If we’re talking about a reset, then the EU should ban Google/Apple/Amazon/Huawei/Xiaomi/Meta/etc products and services in their entirety, and finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements.
As a EU citizen I don’t see why those companies should have the disproportionate amount of control and oversight in our daily lives they have today while our bureaucracies are stuck in a constant game of cat and mouse against them, as they have proven countless times they see EU regulation as hurdles to be worked around rather than fundamental rules to play by.
We need that reset in America too. These companies are too big and powerful. There is no fair free market with them just due to their size. Let alone anti competitive actions or lobbying or regulatory capture.
Can we get a reset on the state actors while we're at it? Because I'm sure there are a number of countries who can't infiltrate 2025 FAANG, but could infiltrate 2015 FAANG, and any start-up is going to be dealing with scaling and will have vulnerabilities that rhyme with 2015 FAANG.
"The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they'd be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry them through [...] The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible."
Look at the reaction to "cookie dialogs" which are the companies trying to toe the line as close as possible on compliance (and arguably often over it) at the expense of UX. Banning Android and iOS would absolutely trigger a much stronger reaction and would seem to me to be away to torpedo any regulation by including it such a requirement
Realistically they are not irreplaceable. They provide convenience for coordination of some stuff but a company that would be able to sell smartphones at scale with an alternative OS could get there pretty fast. All the very useful apps are some sort of marketplace/coordinating software (with an identity/messaging system) that already has a web version anyway.
The major issue is the massive web index since that would take a lot of capital and time to recreate but there are already various alternatives that could get better with use.
For the commercial web it doesn't matter as much since it's always evolving anyway and every big website already has its own search engine.
Would be inconvenient at first but not something that would affect people's lives as drastically as tech people like to think.
I think that's quite an unfair misrepresentation of what happened in Nepal which had many confounding factors and was years in the making. The narrative that it was "just gen z wanting their apps" only serves the purposes of the old regime.
That is a very strange way of looking at things. Should people not get upset at their desires being interfered with based upon some arrogant busybody's concept of the ideal? For the crime of being liked by too many people?
Frankly declaring a civilization dead over not doing what you want sounds very much like an egocentric "elite tantrum". Like all of the arrogants who think that they can know the best interests of others better than them in spite of the fact that every time that has tried it just amounts to an unaccountable autocracy. After all the nobility were supposed to 'know better' for the peasantry and represent them.
China is doing it. Huawei now has its own proper OS (and no, it is not Linux. Lookup HarmonyOS Next). I played with the laptop a bit a couple months ago. It is very basic but it has a functioning browser and some really neat features.
I can’t imagine anyone in my environment becoming really angry over this. Some of them would have to find new time sinks though—-hopefully ones that actually benefit them instead of turning them into commodities.
> finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements
The EU has been trying to do that for as long as I can remember and they have little to show for it. What reason is there to believe this will suddenly produce useful results?
There are many EU citizens who don't hold your opinion. Are they allowed to do business with the these entities on their own terms? Why can't you just de-google and de-apple and de-meta and let other people make their own decisions?
Sure they can, by setting up a VPN. The same kind of software-config friction people have to overcome to avoid the anticompetitive megacorpos. I'd say it's sensible to have the default lazy option land somewhere in the middle rather than completely lopsided against users.
How exactly do you expect to sell it internationally after banning all competition? Odds are very good that the world will flip you the bird too and ban your software in kind. These central planners as usual lack the empathy to be effective when dealing with their own economies, let alone international ones.
sucks that market forces doesn't allow a lone developer to be noticed against one of these companies because people refuse to spend time to try something new. as if time costs money. if we spend time on marketing we will be worse developers. then be surprised when one person takes down entire sector.
It's not just that: it's that the hyper platform companies have been allowed to turn {build a better X} into {build a better X + rebuild their entire platform/ecosystem}.
That's the real harm to competition, and why the Digital Markets Act is a great idea.
Fuck Google et al. maintaining their market hegemonies.
In order to build a better web browser, once should not also have to build a highly trafficked search engine AND a widely deployed mobile phone OS.
Yet that's exactly the situation that missing monopoly enforcement has allowed to come into being...
We keep on hearing those nationalism-protectionist rackets proposed as if that will produce something better than an also-ran reinventing the wheel. And expecting to sell internationally after denying the world the same chance? You aren't that special.
Saying that they need first for there to be no alternatives and then they will produce something better should raise some major red flags. You wouldn't accept an exclusivity contract of that nature with your grocery store but accepting it for your communications? Not to mention the real reason for such protectionism goes unspoken: more government spying and backdoors and more censorship and control. That was why China rolled their own.
Haha, this does make me laugh a bit. They've not been doing antything illegal (they almost certainly have fwiw) because they've been the ones capturing regulations and massive influencing laws.
Furthermore they've violated plenty of consumer protection laws in countries where those are strong, so the entire premise doesn't hold up.
I meant property rights violations generally. The consumer agreed to something which they didn’t provide. If the consumer simply wasn’t served better than he could have, that may violate some non-objective law, but not the consumer’s property rights.
Their violations is the same kind of persecution that minority group face, such as with gay marriages. The laws are written specifically to target them.
Influencing the law can be quite different. Lobbying is legal, other kinds of peddling are not. If they exceeded their legal limits (or whatever, I’m not into it) and, in fact, took the role of an aggressor, that would be a problem and the government would have to sue them. Even in this case, destroying them should be the very last resort, not the norm.
> If we’re talking about a reset, then the EU should ban Google/Apple/Amazon/Huawei/Xiaomi/Meta/etc products and services in their entirety, and finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements.
I don't think you appreciate quite how much easier it is to write down rules and use your populace as economic hostages to get fines out of companies created in places with good economic policies, than it is to make your own stuff internally.
Fair! And more seriously than the tiktok algorithm, there's a load of manufacturing work figured out in countries that the US is happy to apply sanctions to.
The same can be said about the EU bureaucracies, why do they have a disproportionate amount of control and oversight in daily lives of EU citizens?
We need a full reset from them. Countries should get their powers back. Take it back from the non elected EU bureaucrats.
There are some very worrisome things going on in the EU with Chat Control, Ministry of Truth, Digital ID Systems, and Central Bank Digital Currencies.
Each individual piece will be introduced to fix something or prevent something. But it is a slippery slope to also use it for something else, and more and more. Before we know it we will live in a continent that is ruled by an authoritarian mob like in China.
macOS, chrome os, Debian, Ubuntu, red hat, nix, FreeBSD, openbsd, haiku os, react os, pop, etc etc etc.
In perhaps one of the weirder twists of fate you probably have more options for voting on where your documents get saved now than at any other time in computing history. And if you would respond that many of those aren’t viable alternatives to windows or incur massive switching costs, what about doing a “reset” / ban solves that problem?
This is the same as telling me, that I could just leave the EU and only have to never interact with them or one of its citizens to not be effected by their rules, and since travelling is easier then ever why wouldn't this be an easier option?
Sure it’s the same in that I’m telling you that you need to give up your existing lifestyle for a different one to get what you want.
But I would suggest that installing a new OS is vastly less complicated, less expensive, less disruptive and less fraught with life threatening peril than immigrating to an entirely new country and continent. And I’d wager you’re vastly more likely to get the results you want changing your OS than you are voting for a politician when you’re unhappy with the current state of things.
All true, and I would still have to deal with Office files. Wasn't it an EU regulation that forced Microsoft to make it's file format publicly accessible?
The fact that companies like Google are complaining (while pretending like they’re looking out for consumers - which is unsavory) is a great signal indicator that this is going to disrupt monopolistic / anti-consumer business practice's. Good.
You know it can be both, right? Standing up to tech giants can be a good pretext to introduce new taxes, create new smaller monopolies who happen to be your friends, spy on the masses, etc.
But it’s all cool, we are standing up for the tech feudalists.
You mean being both pro-consumer and pro-producer? Sure it can be both, provided we establish the principle uniting the two. Property rights is one. Altruism is another. The two would lead to totally different outcomes.
Speaking of property rights, creating new smaller monopolies is in no way “pro-producer.” Nobody truly benefits by robbing the other, it’s as shortsighted “benefit” as it can be. We need long-term predictable policies that don’t criminalize what is, in fact, not criminal.
Otherwise it can be both anti-producer and anti-consumer, too.
on Android by forcing us to remove our legitimate safeguards that protect users’ security and safety
All you want is complete control, as evidenced by your intention to lock down devices against their actual owners. Google is effectively an unelected global government at this point. Piss off!
But also the EU wants to add chat control so they can read all your encrypted messages so maybe you _dont_ want them to have a say in how Android safeguards work?
The EU is not a single person. There are some people among the EU elites who fight for an open Internet, and some who want to control the Internet. They are not the same people.
Yes, time for a reset. A reset of all the influence foreign companies have on my country! It is many the times I have daydreamed of seizing their assets and pushing them out... Goodbye Apple, goodbye Google!
There are more than two mobile OS's, we just have to be allowed to run our choice of them on our choice of device, and the hardware vendors should be forced to not ship with a default OS.
It's crazy talk. Who's got the time to standardize messaging and data for WWAN modems on mobile devices? It's not like any operating systems ever implemented userland emulation of Android or iOS APIs and delivered a roughly identical experience to customers. Way too unrealistic, we're talking about space age technology here.
We should be happy that Google and Apple don't charge us more for all their hard work. If they leave there are no other phone manufacturers in the world, Europe would simply return to the dark ages.
alternatives exist. they are not successful because lack of scale makes them not profitable enough to sustain development. if google and apple went away, they would be able to reach the scale needed to make a profit an become successful.
It's interesting to see the number of folks apparently in favor of DMA and the strict regulatory environment in EU. Genuinely curious: what is the concrete benefit for users (and does it offset the negatives)? And does this foster a healthy and thriving environment for innovation?
In my liberal view it sounds awful for users and entrepreneurs alike. Wondering what are the arguments in favor (other than "apple/google = bad").
E.g.
Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.
People in Europe don't have the automatic anti-regulation sentiment that US has. Regulations, at least from consumer perspective, seem to be working pretty well in the EU.
- My mobile operator wanted to charge me $6/MB for data roaming, until the anti-business EU regulation killed the golden goose. Roaming is free across EU. The mobile operator is still in business.
- USB-C not just on iPhone, but also all the crappy gadgets that used to be micro-USB. Consumer prices on electronics probably rose by $0.01 per unit.
- Chip & pin and NFC contactless payments were supported everywhere many years before ApplePay adopted them. European regulators forced banks to make fraud their problem and cooperate to fix it.
- The card payment system got upgraded despite card interchange fees being legally capped to ~0.3%. The bureaucrats killed an innovative business model of ever-increasing merchant fees given back to card owners as cashback, which made everyone else paying the same prices with cash the suckers subsidising the card businesses.
- Apple insinuates they only give 1 year of warranty, but it magically becomes 2 years if you remind them they're in the EU.
Just a day ago, we've had Google's idea of "useful results" frontpaged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45366566. Between this, the malicious restrictions being added to Android, and countless other things, I'm genuinely surprised anyone still believes them to be acting in users' best interests.
I guess it won't but it shows they absolutely don't care about pertinence of search results anymore, so their argument that DMA will make for worse search results does not hold much value when they are already worsening their search results out of their own volition. (those are ads but they take the entire page and are easily confused for results, so as a standard-issue user the difference between ads and search results is vague. It would be improved by reverting to the previous UI of ads where they were shown quite differently)
> In my liberal view it sounds awful for users and entrepreneurs alike
curious to read what arguments you have against or in favor?
From what I understand, in European countries (inc EU) both public and private sector rely predominantly on US and Asian imports for Computer Hardware, Software and Digital Services.
With DMA, they're looking to level the playing fields for local entrepreneurs, and likewise for small firms from say, developing economies such as in Africa or Middle East for example (the neighborhood).
Also worth noting, that, Europe has a massive problem with brain-drain and a rapidly aging population. If local entrepreneurs can't compete with Asian or US tech giants, they have to move to Asia or the USA.
In your quote, aren’t those the same thing? Isn’t Google just playing intermediary and integrating it onto their website and claiming that’s different?
Correct, but in this case people went to Google to search for flights, so one may argue the user wants to see, well, flight information. Yet, despite Google knowing the answer, it cannot show to users, per DMA.
Instead, Google needs to send the user to a 3P website, which may or may not have the information the user is looking for. And the 3P website needs to monetize its traffic, so you should expect another wave of ads (in addition to the ones you already saw at google.com), plus cookie consent banners, affiliate links, offer for hotels, car rental, etc.
Google does not want to show them flight information, it wants to make money. They happen to be showing flight information right now. Their interests do not align with yours.
The DMA ensures a healthy competitive market which keeps enshittification at bay by keeping "using a competing service" a viable threat.
Google Flights is the best and by far the least "enshitified" flight booking app. There is already a competitive market and I use Google because it's better.
> Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.
Lmao this is just such a big pile of nothing. Lets let Google and Apple run unchecked so consumers can see a link to a hotel. Yes. Good deal.
"Regulatory burdens and uncertainty are delaying our launch of new products, like our latest AI features, by up to a year after they launch in the rest of the world."
The AI features cause the same problems they are claiming the DMA creates...
IIRC its technically not killing sideloading, but enforcing a required signature where you need to go through google so that the software can be sideloaded... So they can say that they aren't technically killing sideloading :)
The companies affected whining about is a sign that it may actually have some effect.
Remember: New laws are made because someone has been acting in ways society agrees they shouldn’t have been and this DEFINITELY applies to big tech companies. It’s a testament to how bad your behavior must have been if we go through all the trouble to come up with a law to forbid it.
And by society you mean other biggish companies that feel they cannot compete, right? (Whether they can actually compete is true or not, it probably is, but my point is it’s not the general citizen lambda that have these beefs.)
The EU should tell Goggle to go take a long walk off a short dock.
>The DMA’s biggest challenge remains: How do we boost innovation and deliver cutting-edge products to Europe while navigating complex and untested new rules?
Why should Europe want to cave to Goggle's desire to deepen its clawhold on Europe's market? To help it extend its monopoly deep into the rest of civilization?
Reset is the right word. Break-up these mega corps that naturally have become extractive to the point they themselves starting to rot. If "break-up" is too strong, call it a "reset".
Its almost like Google and Apple are colluding to undermine legitimate laws to protect their profits. Guess they feel emboldened by having a raving lunatic in the White House, willing to attack allies (or whats left of that friendship) to protect the interests of private companies.
Oh of course Google is pushing this too. I thought Apple was dumb to push this, makes more sense as a multilateral thing.
I’m sure the EU won’t take a dim view of this at all.
“Senator, we’d like racketeering laws repealed. They’re making running our protection rackets much harder. How are we supposed to innovate for our customers if you keep making new kinds of threats illegal?”
The issue with DMA is that the laws are very vague and appear to forbid basically any private API calls between products if your business is big. You basically need to turn every one of your systems into an AWS service; and then on top of that not favor your own system over those registered by competitors. This is supposed to level the playing field but making and maintaining public APIs like this is tons of work in terms of coordination and so stuff really does take a lot longer to build for EU to meet the requirements; or to confirm that it somehow doesn’t need to be a public API.
Yeah this is exactly my impression of what makes the DMA suck for a company like Apple.
It makes it easier to not offer functionality in Europe. Because to offer the functionality in Europe you have to do the extra work of making sure any competitor who could go crying to the euro officials can plausibly inject a competing thing with equal integration.
If they want to offer functionality in Europe they should consider this from the beginning as cost of doing business.
They pride themselves as being privacy and security minded when releasing new products.
They already have mechanisms to trust some accessories and apps ("my watch" vs. "your watch"). Just offer the same to devices not made by them.
If the user then decides to install the (probably illegal) "Meta Spy Master 9000 App" then so be it.
They are adults after all.
The DMA very explicitly disagrees with the notion of "Apple knows best" and until the tech giants come to terms with that, their comments on the laws cannot be trusted.
I would love to see them cooperate because then, over time, their considerable technical knowledge could be used to work out the details.
Even for a big company like Apple or Google, a 10x increase in public API surface area sounds nuts to maintain in terms of cost but chiefly in terms of time: it will be so much slower to evolve a system once it’s festooned with previously private api surfaces that could change quickly, but now need to be public and offer backwards compatibility or you’ll get hit with a DMA fine.
That sounds wonderful, I wish it worked like that. Imagine Microsoft needing to fully document OneDrive integration points and APIs and make it possible for me to plug my NAS / ownCloud / NextCloud / whatever with the same level of integration.
I mean, sounds great to me. These devices are integral to our daily lives and so complete vendor lock-in and self preference shouldn't be a thing anymore.
One should be able to "mix and match ecosystems" so to speak and expect that any accessory will work to the same level, with the same features as a first party one.
Why shouldn't third parties be able to integrate using AWDL to enable bluetooth earbud device switching and AirDrop across operating systems, for example. Why shouldn't a WearOS watch be able to have the same notification handling and messaging capabilities as an Apple Watch on iOS? Let my windows PC have a shared clipboard with my iPhone just like my mac can, etc.
Well, a public standard would be great but not necessary. In the Apple example they just need to document AWDL and let people use those APIs instead of keeping them private. The protocol and APIs already exist they are just gate kept by Apple.
And it’s impossible to go to the hotel, airline website directly? I for one refuse to use a third party booking company. If anything goes wrong or you want to change snything, the hotel can’t really do anything.
Most of my traveling outside of the US has been in Canada, Mexico, central and South American and the Caribbean. You can find those chains in most of those countries.
I have been to London and found plenty of choices for Hilton. Looking at our bucket list for the next few years (we started traveling a lot post 2021), I’m looking at Hyatts in Spain (Barcelona, Seville and Madrid), in Australia and Japan.
It’s not until I get to countries in Africa where I can’t find many chains. In big cities in Europe, Australia and Asia, the American chains are ubiquitous.
> So now we are calling booking.com a “monopoly” ,
No, you are. I suggested they're not exactly a small player, considering that DMA is trying to also appeal to local entrepreneurs/startups - and not stand for consumers too.
Personally i use any channel that suits my need and budget, including Booking, Google, etc, but DMA is regulating for 450million people so, I can see their side of argument.
> Why not regulate Spotify
what about them? not a Spotify user - so what can they do that say YT Music, Amazon Music, Apple etc aren't allowed?
How do you have a “local entrepreneurs startup” that has a global catalog of hotels all around the world?
The problem with the EU in general is that every time they try to pass a law they run into the pesky problem of free will and users preferring the offerings of the BigTech companies not realizing that all of the laws they pass further entrench the big companies because they have the resources to both desk with the regulations and they can create and nurture their business in more favorable countries like the US and then use those resources to expand.
The reason that the tech environment is so anemic in the EU is not because there aren’t enough laws and regulation.
But the Spotify model seems to be what customers want.
And it's not like the average artist made a ton of money before Spotify, there has long been a high supply of artists, which in theory keeps their pay down. (higher supply -> lower price)
You could also say that many artists made zero money before but now make some and the ones that used to make a lot are losing some by being on streaming.
The whole idea of laws like the DMA isnt that the whiny babies that consumers are get whatever their monkey brain wants. Its to protect the wider marketplace.
And yes yes it isnt perfect. But the crying and weeping of the big American tech companies show that it is working as intended.
> Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.
That's exactly what "leveling the playing field" means, which the Author also acknowledged in his introduction.
By forcing Google to link to intermediaries, it takes away the power and monopoly of Google and give competitors a chance.
This post is nothing but lobbying for Google and against the DMA with shady and unscrupulous arguments.
> Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.
Well, it doesn't seem to be true because a quick search right now shows hotel rates and flights from the hotel or airline's own site and various aggregators. Is Google breaking the law or what am I missing?
> The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion.
This sounds incredibly suspicious - what is Google omitting here? I've never heard of the DMA forbidding direct results.
Man what bullshit. Here's the owner (and 4th author of the paper) [0] of the consultancy that authored the paper [1] they reference. She (almost certainly) has Meta stock!
> We have proactively made many changes to our products to comply with the Google Play Store ToS, including... But we and other companies still face considerable uncertainty and unpredictability...
I have a hard time seeing them doing that. Seems like it would be too big a hit to the stock price.
However, on the other side, if the EU does manage to drive Apple or Google out I wonder if that would cause them real problems from citizens.
Regulations can certainly be nice but at a certain point people may get very annoyed by the results to the point of wanting them removed, even if they’re doing a good job at exactly what they were designed for. Simply because they’re inconveniencing people through the fault of the company making the device.
If you were to run a poll what percent of people would be willing to just give up the smartphone brand they like for something that isn’t android or iOS for the sake of DMA enforcement?
Yeah, the problem is - what is that? It doesn't exist because the duopoloy has successfully shut out all other potential entrants.
HarmanyOS maybe? So the EU just exchanges being dependent on US tech for Chinese tech?
I think something does need to be done, this duopoly is clearly abusive at this point, but we need to some how incentivize development of another, preferably open source, option and then protect it.
Controlling what we do with our own devices that we paid for and siphoning off all that data nonstop for profit? Piss off google! And ditto for Apple and Meta! Just siphoning off our tax dollars of road, electricity, water to turn around and sell our attention to the highest bidder to control us again.
Oh, now Google is joining Apple in the complaining. Because you know, they are poor little struggle businesses that really can't adapt fast enough.
I find Google more useful than Apple (they provide more stuff for the price to pay, which is bit of "privacy" that doesn't matter that much since Ads will exist no matter what) and they have been generally more open; but they winning is really sad.
They are at a size where basically nobody can meaningfully compete, because nobody gets to drain billions of dollars for being the most used entry point to the web.
I think the rules are working and alternatives are already starting to develop for various things, which is basically why they are complaining.
So, they can fuck off.
Boohoo, poor Google. And won't somebody think of the consumers? This is honestly shameless. How I wish for a world rid of these insufferable American monopolies.
Everyone involved with this should be fired, for betraying Google and Android as a maybe not quite so incredibly awful soulless ghastly thief upon human potential. Your campaign should 100% be against abuse of powers against the sickness of Apple's far more high castle walls garden trapping everyone in, but your most useless cad people have convinced you to try to disinform and lie to society, to tell us freedom comes only in bondage and in lack of controls. Fire these people and in a better world, chain them to the wall as traitors to human potential.
I can not fucking believe Google is carrying water for the Apple abomination like this.
> We remain concerned that these changes to Search are a result of the DMA prioritizing the commercial interests of a small set of intermediary sites — who often shout the loudest in these debates — over the ability of most businesses to sell directly to their customers.
Say Google ... of all people. I would be ashamed working for a company and writing this shit. Ashamed of myself!
Nice idea but expressly prohibited by ICANN. Must be 3+ letters.
"Applied-for gTLD strings in ASCII must be composed of three or more visually distinct characters. Two-character ASCII strings are not permitted, to avoid conflicting with current and future country-codes based on the ISO 3166-1 standard."
>Lower quality online services: People in the EU need up to 50% more searches to find what they need when they search for hotels, restaurants and things to buy.
The EU is wasting their citizens time with this law. It should be reverted as the current version is hurting consumers.
If we’re talking about a reset, then the EU should ban Google/Apple/Amazon/Huawei/Xiaomi/Meta/etc products and services in their entirety, and finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements.
As a EU citizen I don’t see why those companies should have the disproportionate amount of control and oversight in our daily lives they have today while our bureaucracies are stuck in a constant game of cat and mouse against them, as they have proven countless times they see EU regulation as hurdles to be worked around rather than fundamental rules to play by.
We need that reset in America too. These companies are too big and powerful. There is no fair free market with them just due to their size. Let alone anti competitive actions or lobbying or regulatory capture.
Can we get a reset on the state actors while we're at it? Because I'm sure there are a number of countries who can't infiltrate 2025 FAANG, but could infiltrate 2015 FAANG, and any start-up is going to be dealing with scaling and will have vulnerabilities that rhyme with 2015 FAANG.
Is that realistic? Or would the pain of that be high enough to cause a revolt against the law to allow people’s beloved phone OSes back?
I’m not arguing the status who is good, more “is it too late to fix?”
"The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they'd be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry them through [...] The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible."
https://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
Look at the reaction to "cookie dialogs" which are the companies trying to toe the line as close as possible on compliance (and arguably often over it) at the expense of UX. Banning Android and iOS would absolutely trigger a much stronger reaction and would seem to me to be away to torpedo any regulation by including it such a requirement
Realistically they are not irreplaceable. They provide convenience for coordination of some stuff but a company that would be able to sell smartphones at scale with an alternative OS could get there pretty fast. All the very useful apps are some sort of marketplace/coordinating software (with an identity/messaging system) that already has a web version anyway.
The major issue is the massive web index since that would take a lot of capital and time to recreate but there are already various alternatives that could get better with use. For the commercial web it doesn't matter as much since it's always evolving anyway and every big website already has its own search engine. Would be inconvenient at first but not something that would affect people's lives as drastically as tech people like to think.
Ironically the main examples are places like Russia and China who built their own local versions of everything.
If the one thing people revolt over is those companies, that consumerism, then our civilization is dead and it is not worth to save it.
Yes. But that would happen, just need to check Nepal
I think that's quite an unfair misrepresentation of what happened in Nepal which had many confounding factors and was years in the making. The narrative that it was "just gen z wanting their apps" only serves the purposes of the old regime.
this can be said about any revolt against any government. It is not a coincidence that there are riots when governments try to regulate apps.
Can that not be said of any revolt?
That is a very strange way of looking at things. Should people not get upset at their desires being interfered with based upon some arrogant busybody's concept of the ideal? For the crime of being liked by too many people?
Frankly declaring a civilization dead over not doing what you want sounds very much like an egocentric "elite tantrum". Like all of the arrogants who think that they can know the best interests of others better than them in spite of the fact that every time that has tried it just amounts to an unaccountable autocracy. After all the nobility were supposed to 'know better' for the peasantry and represent them.
It's always too late to fix and too big to fail until it happens and everyone sees it's not that bad.
China is doing it. Huawei now has its own proper OS (and no, it is not Linux. Lookup HarmonyOS Next). I played with the laptop a bit a couple months ago. It is very basic but it has a functioning browser and some really neat features.
I can’t imagine anyone in my environment becoming really angry over this. Some of them would have to find new time sinks though—-hopefully ones that actually benefit them instead of turning them into commodities.
>Or would the pain of that be high enough to cause a revolt against the law to allow people’s beloved phone OSes back?
Nobody that is not a developer loves an OS, and there's a large subset of developers who don't even care that much.
Have you talked to many apple users?
> finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements
The EU has been trying to do that for as long as I can remember and they have little to show for it. What reason is there to believe this will suddenly produce useful results?
First time I hear about this funding. Where can I apply?
I only know of one project which is reserved for free software, it's NGI0 <https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/>, which is going to be cut in 2027 <https://edri.org/our-work/european-commission-cuts-funding-s...>.
However, most other EU programmes do allow and even claim to encourage free software companies to apply.
It depends. How big and politically connected are you?
> How big and politically connected are you?
I’m not allowed to divulge that information. Can you tell me where to apply?
Can you just link the tenders/funding if it exists?
Is this deflection?
There are many EU citizens who don't hold your opinion. Are they allowed to do business with the these entities on their own terms? Why can't you just de-google and de-apple and de-meta and let other people make their own decisions?
Sure they can, by setting up a VPN. The same kind of software-config friction people have to overcome to avoid the anticompetitive megacorpos. I'd say it's sensible to have the default lazy option land somewhere in the middle rather than completely lopsided against users.
They should at a minimum tax these services like goods. They’re mining our attention and extracting insane profits and pay nothing for it.
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You are proposing that every citizen decides which laws apply to them and which not?
> finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements
No thanks, just fund local-only and self-hosted open source instead.
100%. Europe could suddenly be a leader and the sacrifice is just giving up technologies that are making us sick
How exactly do you expect to sell it internationally after banning all competition? Odds are very good that the world will flip you the bird too and ban your software in kind. These central planners as usual lack the empathy to be effective when dealing with their own economies, let alone international ones.
How do you think Google Calendar or Google Sheets or Google Keep are making you sick?
Keeping you locked in an ecosystem that is so much more than those singular examples.
Yes. For all the things that get done in the name of "national security", this is the biggest threat to national security there is.
sucks that market forces doesn't allow a lone developer to be noticed against one of these companies because people refuse to spend time to try something new. as if time costs money. if we spend time on marketing we will be worse developers. then be surprised when one person takes down entire sector.
It's not just that: it's that the hyper platform companies have been allowed to turn {build a better X} into {build a better X + rebuild their entire platform/ecosystem}.
That's the real harm to competition, and why the Digital Markets Act is a great idea.
Fuck Google et al. maintaining their market hegemonies.
In order to build a better web browser, once should not also have to build a highly trafficked search engine AND a widely deployed mobile phone OS.
Yet that's exactly the situation that missing monopoly enforcement has allowed to come into being...
We keep on hearing those nationalism-protectionist rackets proposed as if that will produce something better than an also-ran reinventing the wheel. And expecting to sell internationally after denying the world the same chance? You aren't that special.
Saying that they need first for there to be no alternatives and then they will produce something better should raise some major red flags. You wouldn't accept an exclusivity contract of that nature with your grocery store but accepting it for your communications? Not to mention the real reason for such protectionism goes unspoken: more government spying and backdoors and more censorship and control. That was why China rolled their own.
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Haha, this does make me laugh a bit. They've not been doing antything illegal (they almost certainly have fwiw) because they've been the ones capturing regulations and massive influencing laws.
Furthermore they've violated plenty of consumer protection laws in countries where those are strong, so the entire premise doesn't hold up.
I meant property rights violations generally. The consumer agreed to something which they didn’t provide. If the consumer simply wasn’t served better than he could have, that may violate some non-objective law, but not the consumer’s property rights.
Their violations is the same kind of persecution that minority group face, such as with gay marriages. The laws are written specifically to target them.
Influencing the law can be quite different. Lobbying is legal, other kinds of peddling are not. If they exceeded their legal limits (or whatever, I’m not into it) and, in fact, took the role of an aggressor, that would be a problem and the government would have to sue them. Even in this case, destroying them should be the very last resort, not the norm.
You sure are really interested in this one particular topic for a new account...
> If we’re talking about a reset, then the EU should ban Google/Apple/Amazon/Huawei/Xiaomi/Meta/etc products and services in their entirety, and finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements.
I don't think you appreciate quite how much easier it is to write down rules and use your populace as economic hostages to get fines out of companies created in places with good economic policies, than it is to make your own stuff internally.
Trump seems to have figured that out with Tiktok at least...
Fair! And more seriously than the tiktok algorithm, there's a load of manufacturing work figured out in countries that the US is happy to apply sanctions to.
The same can be said about the EU bureaucracies, why do they have a disproportionate amount of control and oversight in daily lives of EU citizens?
We need a full reset from them. Countries should get their powers back. Take it back from the non elected EU bureaucrats.
There are some very worrisome things going on in the EU with Chat Control, Ministry of Truth, Digital ID Systems, and Central Bank Digital Currencies.
Each individual piece will be introduced to fix something or prevent something. But it is a slippery slope to also use it for something else, and more and more. Before we know it we will live in a continent that is ruled by an authoritarian mob like in China.
At least in the EU people have some kind of vote. But I can't vote for not having OneDrive my default saving space for documents.
macOS, chrome os, Debian, Ubuntu, red hat, nix, FreeBSD, openbsd, haiku os, react os, pop, etc etc etc.
In perhaps one of the weirder twists of fate you probably have more options for voting on where your documents get saved now than at any other time in computing history. And if you would respond that many of those aren’t viable alternatives to windows or incur massive switching costs, what about doing a “reset” / ban solves that problem?
This is the same as telling me, that I could just leave the EU and only have to never interact with them or one of its citizens to not be effected by their rules, and since travelling is easier then ever why wouldn't this be an easier option?
Sure it’s the same in that I’m telling you that you need to give up your existing lifestyle for a different one to get what you want.
But I would suggest that installing a new OS is vastly less complicated, less expensive, less disruptive and less fraught with life threatening peril than immigrating to an entirely new country and continent. And I’d wager you’re vastly more likely to get the results you want changing your OS than you are voting for a politician when you’re unhappy with the current state of things.
All true, and I would still have to deal with Office files. Wasn't it an EU regulation that forced Microsoft to make it's file format publicly accessible?
The fact that companies like Google are complaining (while pretending like they’re looking out for consumers - which is unsavory) is a great signal indicator that this is going to disrupt monopolistic / anti-consumer business practice's. Good.
You know it can be both, right? Standing up to tech giants can be a good pretext to introduce new taxes, create new smaller monopolies who happen to be your friends, spy on the masses, etc.
But it’s all cool, we are standing up for the tech feudalists.
You mean being both pro-consumer and pro-producer? Sure it can be both, provided we establish the principle uniting the two. Property rights is one. Altruism is another. The two would lead to totally different outcomes.
Speaking of property rights, creating new smaller monopolies is in no way “pro-producer.” Nobody truly benefits by robbing the other, it’s as shortsighted “benefit” as it can be. We need long-term predictable policies that don’t criminalize what is, in fact, not criminal.
Otherwise it can be both anti-producer and anti-consumer, too.
What about anti-producer government practices?
on Android by forcing us to remove our legitimate safeguards that protect users’ security and safety
All you want is complete control, as evidenced by your intention to lock down devices against their actual owners. Google is effectively an unelected global government at this point. Piss off!
But also the EU wants to add chat control so they can read all your encrypted messages so maybe you _dont_ want them to have a say in how Android safeguards work?
I'm happy for the EU to decide I control what software's on my phone and where I got it from, these are 2 separate issues
The EU is not a single person. There are some people among the EU elites who fight for an open Internet, and some who want to control the Internet. They are not the same people.
> How do we boost innovation and deliver cutting-edge products to Europe while navigating complex and untested new rules?
Ask your lawyers? They can parkour through the most complex laws when you need European tax loopholes.
What if you just tried making products that don’t seem to violate the rules on their face?
It’s not like the DMA outlaws software. It deals with certain practices, and makes certain business models pretty untenable.
But it doesn’t just ban everything.
Yes, time for a reset. A reset of all the influence foreign companies have on my country! It is many the times I have daydreamed of seizing their assets and pushing them out... Goodbye Apple, goodbye Google!
So, what, every country is going to have its own cell phone operating systems? Instead of two mobile OS's we'll have hundreds?
There are more than two mobile OS's, we just have to be allowed to run our choice of them on our choice of device, and the hardware vendors should be forced to not ship with a default OS.
If the alternative is Google and Apple deciding which rules apply to them, yes?
Not hundreds, but a couple more options would be really nice.
Hundreds of forks of Android, all having slightly different extensions but a common API, would be ideal.
It's crazy talk. Who's got the time to standardize messaging and data for WWAN modems on mobile devices? It's not like any operating systems ever implemented userland emulation of Android or iOS APIs and delivered a roughly identical experience to customers. Way too unrealistic, we're talking about space age technology here.
We should be happy that Google and Apple don't charge us more for all their hard work. If they leave there are no other phone manufacturers in the world, Europe would simply return to the dark ages.
alternatives exist. they are not successful because lack of scale makes them not profitable enough to sustain development. if google and apple went away, they would be able to reach the scale needed to make a profit an become successful.
This is what open source is for.
I just can't see it being allowed by Washington.
Yeah, the US might do something crazy in response like put up tariffs on allied democracies
I wasn’t aware they had veto power.
I get they THINK they do.
But I don’t think they do.
Why did I read this comment in Russian?
Size the means of computation?
It's interesting to see the number of folks apparently in favor of DMA and the strict regulatory environment in EU. Genuinely curious: what is the concrete benefit for users (and does it offset the negatives)? And does this foster a healthy and thriving environment for innovation?
In my liberal view it sounds awful for users and entrepreneurs alike. Wondering what are the arguments in favor (other than "apple/google = bad").
E.g.
Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.
People in Europe don't have the automatic anti-regulation sentiment that US has. Regulations, at least from consumer perspective, seem to be working pretty well in the EU.
- My mobile operator wanted to charge me $6/MB for data roaming, until the anti-business EU regulation killed the golden goose. Roaming is free across EU. The mobile operator is still in business.
- USB-C not just on iPhone, but also all the crappy gadgets that used to be micro-USB. Consumer prices on electronics probably rose by $0.01 per unit.
- Chip & pin and NFC contactless payments were supported everywhere many years before ApplePay adopted them. European regulators forced banks to make fraud their problem and cooperate to fix it.
- The card payment system got upgraded despite card interchange fees being legally capped to ~0.3%. The bureaucrats killed an innovative business model of ever-increasing merchant fees given back to card owners as cashback, which made everyone else paying the same prices with cash the suckers subsidising the card businesses.
- Apple insinuates they only give 1 year of warranty, but it magically becomes 2 years if you remind them they're in the EU.
> - Apple insinuates they only give 1 year of warranty, but it magically becomes 2 years if you remind them they're in the EU.
3 actually, if bought after 2021
Just a day ago, we've had Google's idea of "useful results" frontpaged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45366566. Between this, the malicious restrictions being added to Android, and countless other things, I'm genuinely surprised anyone still believes them to be acting in users' best interests.
Just a day ago, we've had Google's idea of "useful results" frontpaged:
I'm not following. How does DMA help with this?
I guess it won't but it shows they absolutely don't care about pertinence of search results anymore, so their argument that DMA will make for worse search results does not hold much value when they are already worsening their search results out of their own volition. (those are ads but they take the entire page and are easily confused for results, so as a standard-issue user the difference between ads and search results is vague. It would be improved by reverting to the previous UI of ads where they were shown quite differently)
> In my liberal view it sounds awful for users and entrepreneurs alike
curious to read what arguments you have against or in favor?
From what I understand, in European countries (inc EU) both public and private sector rely predominantly on US and Asian imports for Computer Hardware, Software and Digital Services.
With DMA, they're looking to level the playing fields for local entrepreneurs, and likewise for small firms from say, developing economies such as in Africa or Middle East for example (the neighborhood).
Also worth noting, that, Europe has a massive problem with brain-drain and a rapidly aging population. If local entrepreneurs can't compete with Asian or US tech giants, they have to move to Asia or the USA.
In your quote, aren’t those the same thing? Isn’t Google just playing intermediary and integrating it onto their website and claiming that’s different?
Correct, but in this case people went to Google to search for flights, so one may argue the user wants to see, well, flight information. Yet, despite Google knowing the answer, it cannot show to users, per DMA.
Instead, Google needs to send the user to a 3P website, which may or may not have the information the user is looking for. And the 3P website needs to monetize its traffic, so you should expect another wave of ads (in addition to the ones you already saw at google.com), plus cookie consent banners, affiliate links, offer for hotels, car rental, etc.
Is this a better experience for users?
Google does not want to show them flight information, it wants to make money. They happen to be showing flight information right now. Their interests do not align with yours.
The DMA ensures a healthy competitive market which keeps enshittification at bay by keeping "using a competing service" a viable threat.
Google Flights is the best and by far the least "enshitified" flight booking app. There is already a competitive market and I use Google because it's better.
It's already cut down compared to its pre-google interfaces though
Private companies that are "good" can turn bad anytime. Look at "do no evil". Oh wait that was google.
> Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.
Lmao this is just such a big pile of nothing. Lets let Google and Apple run unchecked so consumers can see a link to a hotel. Yes. Good deal.
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> Ew and fucking ew gross.
> What a joke.
> Don't carry water for those dogging humanity like this
Not appropriate for HN. Please don't do that.
"Regulatory burdens and uncertainty are delaying our launch of new products, like our latest AI features, by up to a year after they launch in the rest of the world."
The AI features cause the same problems they are claiming the DMA creates...
> users can download apps from other sources (known as “sideloading”)
Isn't it Google killing sideloading, not the DMA?
Yeah, I noticed that comment too. Pretty rich and really makes me question the whole thing even more than I was originally.
IIRC its technically not killing sideloading, but enforcing a required signature where you need to go through google so that the software can be sideloaded... So they can say that they aren't technically killing sideloading :)
The companies affected whining about is a sign that it may actually have some effect.
Remember: New laws are made because someone has been acting in ways society agrees they shouldn’t have been and this DEFINITELY applies to big tech companies. It’s a testament to how bad your behavior must have been if we go through all the trouble to come up with a law to forbid it.
And by society you mean other biggish companies that feel they cannot compete, right? (Whether they can actually compete is true or not, it probably is, but my point is it’s not the general citizen lambda that have these beefs.)
The EU should tell Goggle to go take a long walk off a short dock.
>The DMA’s biggest challenge remains: How do we boost innovation and deliver cutting-edge products to Europe while navigating complex and untested new rules?
Why should Europe want to cave to Goggle's desire to deepen its clawhold on Europe's market? To help it extend its monopoly deep into the rest of civilization?
Reset is the right word. Break-up these mega corps that naturally have become extractive to the point they themselves starting to rot. If "break-up" is too strong, call it a "reset".
The biggest corporations complaining? What a coincidence.
Something says to me that DMA is working as intended.
Recent and related - others?
Apple Demands EU Repeal the Digital Markets Act - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45380690 - Sept 2025 (64 comments)
Apple says it may stop shipping to the EU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372515 - Sept 2025 (145 comments)
The Digital Markets Act's Impacts on EU Users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45368848 - Sept 2025 (3 comments)
Its almost like Google and Apple are colluding to undermine legitimate laws to protect their profits. Guess they feel emboldened by having a raving lunatic in the White House, willing to attack allies (or whats left of that friendship) to protect the interests of private companies.
Oh of course Google is pushing this too. I thought Apple was dumb to push this, makes more sense as a multilateral thing.
I’m sure the EU won’t take a dim view of this at all.
“Senator, we’d like racketeering laws repealed. They’re making running our protection rackets much harder. How are we supposed to innovate for our customers if you keep making new kinds of threats illegal?”
> Oh of course Google is pushing this too. I thought Apple was dumb to push this, makes more sense as a multilateral thing.
I'm sure there's some political push or at least sign of support behind it happening now. "Our big beautiful tech companies blah blah blah..."
The issue with DMA is that the laws are very vague and appear to forbid basically any private API calls between products if your business is big. You basically need to turn every one of your systems into an AWS service; and then on top of that not favor your own system over those registered by competitors. This is supposed to level the playing field but making and maintaining public APIs like this is tons of work in terms of coordination and so stuff really does take a lot longer to build for EU to meet the requirements; or to confirm that it somehow doesn’t need to be a public API.
Yeah this is exactly my impression of what makes the DMA suck for a company like Apple.
It makes it easier to not offer functionality in Europe. Because to offer the functionality in Europe you have to do the extra work of making sure any competitor who could go crying to the euro officials can plausibly inject a competing thing with equal integration.
If they want to offer functionality in Europe they should consider this from the beginning as cost of doing business.
They pride themselves as being privacy and security minded when releasing new products.
They already have mechanisms to trust some accessories and apps ("my watch" vs. "your watch"). Just offer the same to devices not made by them.
If the user then decides to install the (probably illegal) "Meta Spy Master 9000 App" then so be it.
They are adults after all.
The DMA very explicitly disagrees with the notion of "Apple knows best" and until the tech giants come to terms with that, their comments on the laws cannot be trusted.
I would love to see them cooperate because then, over time, their considerable technical knowledge could be used to work out the details.
Even for a big company like Apple or Google, a 10x increase in public API surface area sounds nuts to maintain in terms of cost but chiefly in terms of time: it will be so much slower to evolve a system once it’s festooned with previously private api surfaces that could change quickly, but now need to be public and offer backwards compatibility or you’ll get hit with a DMA fine.
That sounds wonderful, I wish it worked like that. Imagine Microsoft needing to fully document OneDrive integration points and APIs and make it possible for me to plug my NAS / ownCloud / NextCloud / whatever with the same level of integration.
I mean, sounds great to me. These devices are integral to our daily lives and so complete vendor lock-in and self preference shouldn't be a thing anymore.
One should be able to "mix and match ecosystems" so to speak and expect that any accessory will work to the same level, with the same features as a first party one.
Why shouldn't third parties be able to integrate using AWDL to enable bluetooth earbud device switching and AirDrop across operating systems, for example. Why shouldn't a WearOS watch be able to have the same notification handling and messaging capabilities as an Apple Watch on iOS? Let my windows PC have a shared clipboard with my iPhone just like my mac can, etc.
Wouldn't that bog development down to a crawl, since any new capability now has to have an entire public standard built around it?
Well, a public standard would be great but not necessary. In the Apple example they just need to document AWDL and let people use those APIs instead of keeping them private. The protocol and APIs already exist they are just gate kept by Apple.
The law would probably even allow them certify the vendor, for a reasonable fee, and verify their identity.
All they need to do is implement it in a way that still allows competitors to do their thing. Wha
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For the time being this is just a marketing piece. The question is will they comply? Apple seems to be taking the non-comply approach.
I mean, they did it for sports betting...
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The booking.com CEO also said the DMA was misguided for the same reason on the Stratechery podcast released this week.
Maybe the EU should actually foster an environment where tech companies can grow and compete.
Maybe I will take your comment seriously when Booking is a small player.
So now we are calling booking.com a “monopoly” and there is no other way to easily make hotel and airline reservations?
Why not regulate Spotify as part of the DMA then?
Booking.com parent company (that owns almost every significant booking system) is a monopoly.
And it’s impossible to go to the hotel, airline website directly? I for one refuse to use a third party booking company. If anything goes wrong or you want to change snything, the hotel can’t really do anything.
Most airlines have a functioning website (I don't recall ever booking a ticket at a reseller). Hotels, on the hand, ....
Whats wrong with Hilton, Hyatt, Marriot, or IHG’s websites?
And when things go wrong or you want to change something, I would much rather deal with the hotel directly than deal with a third party.
That limits you to these chains and they are not as popular outside of the USA.
Most of my traveling outside of the US has been in Canada, Mexico, central and South American and the Caribbean. You can find those chains in most of those countries.
I have been to London and found plenty of choices for Hilton. Looking at our bucket list for the next few years (we started traveling a lot post 2021), I’m looking at Hyatts in Spain (Barcelona, Seville and Madrid), in Australia and Japan.
It’s not until I get to countries in Africa where I can’t find many chains. In big cities in Europe, Australia and Asia, the American chains are ubiquitous.
> So now we are calling booking.com a “monopoly” ,
No, you are. I suggested they're not exactly a small player, considering that DMA is trying to also appeal to local entrepreneurs/startups - and not stand for consumers too.
Personally i use any channel that suits my need and budget, including Booking, Google, etc, but DMA is regulating for 450million people so, I can see their side of argument.
> Why not regulate Spotify
what about them? not a Spotify user - so what can they do that say YT Music, Amazon Music, Apple etc aren't allowed?
How do you have a “local entrepreneurs startup” that has a global catalog of hotels all around the world?
The problem with the EU in general is that every time they try to pass a law they run into the pesky problem of free will and users preferring the offerings of the BigTech companies not realizing that all of the laws they pass further entrench the big companies because they have the resources to both desk with the regulations and they can create and nurture their business in more favorable countries like the US and then use those resources to expand.
The reason that the tech environment is so anemic in the EU is not because there aren’t enough laws and regulation.
Not an EU citizen, but I think the amount artists get paid from streaming is a crime.
“But it would kill streaming music!“
If your business model doesn’t work without screwing over the producer of goods, perhaps your business model just doesn’t work.
But the Spotify model seems to be what customers want.
And it's not like the average artist made a ton of money before Spotify, there has long been a high supply of artists, which in theory keeps their pay down. (higher supply -> lower price)
You could also say that many artists made zero money before but now make some and the ones that used to make a lot are losing some by being on streaming.
And Google, Apple, Booking.com, etc are “what the companies want”.
The whole idea of laws like the DMA isnt that the whiny babies that consumers are get whatever their monkey brain wants. Its to protect the wider marketplace.
And yes yes it isnt perfect. But the crying and weeping of the big American tech companies show that it is working as intended.
You are admitting they aren’t passing laws based on what consumers - who they are suppose to represent - want?
No, we are not. The DMA does not talk about "monopolies".
Google and Apple don't need any help growing. They need help accepting competition. I suspect Booking.com suffers from the same ailment.
> Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.
That's exactly what "leveling the playing field" means, which the Author also acknowledged in his introduction.
By forcing Google to link to intermediaries, it takes away the power and monopoly of Google and give competitors a chance.
This post is nothing but lobbying for Google and against the DMA with shady and unscrupulous arguments.
This straight-up is propaganda by Google in its interest, altogether opposing the consumer's interest.
> Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.
Well, it doesn't seem to be true because a quick search right now shows hotel rates and flights from the hotel or airline's own site and various aggregators. Is Google breaking the law or what am I missing?
> The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion.
This sounds incredibly suspicious - what is Google omitting here? I've never heard of the DMA forbidding direct results.
Google looking out for the consumer. Yea, right.
Man what bullshit. Here's the owner (and 4th author of the paper) [0] of the consultancy that authored the paper [1] they reference. She (almost certainly) has Meta stock!
[0]: https://www.iicom.org/profile/dr-eliana-garces/
[1]: https://www.dmcforum.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/120625-F...
Break these companies the fuck up.
> Time for a reset
> We have proactively made many changes to our products to comply with the Google Play Store ToS, including... But we and other companies still face considerable uncertainty and unpredictability...
Fixed :P
The position title of the author is the cherry on the top: "Senior Director, Competition".
Related:
Apple says it may stop shipping to the EU
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372515
I have a hard time seeing them doing that. Seems like it would be too big a hit to the stock price.
However, on the other side, if the EU does manage to drive Apple or Google out I wonder if that would cause them real problems from citizens.
Regulations can certainly be nice but at a certain point people may get very annoyed by the results to the point of wanting them removed, even if they’re doing a good job at exactly what they were designed for. Simply because they’re inconveniencing people through the fault of the company making the device.
If you were to run a poll what percent of people would be willing to just give up the smartphone brand they like for something that isn’t android or iOS for the sake of DMA enforcement?
The drug maybe too strong to resist.
> for something that isn’t android or iOS
Yeah, the problem is - what is that? It doesn't exist because the duopoloy has successfully shut out all other potential entrants.
HarmanyOS maybe? So the EU just exchanges being dependent on US tech for Chinese tech?
I think something does need to be done, this duopoly is clearly abusive at this point, but we need to some how incentivize development of another, preferably open source, option and then protect it.
Controlling what we do with our own devices that we paid for and siphoning off all that data nonstop for profit? Piss off google! And ditto for Apple and Meta! Just siphoning off our tax dollars of road, electricity, water to turn around and sell our attention to the highest bidder to control us again.
I know Digital Markets Act is good for the world when I see Google and Apple complaining about it.
The way big tech is howling about this makes me think it’s probably a good idea
Oh, now Google is joining Apple in the complaining. Because you know, they are poor little struggle businesses that really can't adapt fast enough.
I find Google more useful than Apple (they provide more stuff for the price to pay, which is bit of "privacy" that doesn't matter that much since Ads will exist no matter what) and they have been generally more open; but they winning is really sad.
They are at a size where basically nobody can meaningfully compete, because nobody gets to drain billions of dollars for being the most used entry point to the web.
I think the rules are working and alternatives are already starting to develop for various things, which is basically why they are complaining. So, they can fuck off.
Why we cannot have better search
I'm American and if modern life was dictated by 5 foreign companies I'd be pissed!
Seems like all they're trying to do is stand up to foreign megacorps since American antitrust has been a farce.
Boohoo, poor Google. And won't somebody think of the consumers? This is honestly shameless. How I wish for a world rid of these insufferable American monopolies.
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Everyone involved with this should be fired, for betraying Google and Android as a maybe not quite so incredibly awful soulless ghastly thief upon human potential. Your campaign should 100% be against abuse of powers against the sickness of Apple's far more high castle walls garden trapping everyone in, but your most useless cad people have convinced you to try to disinform and lie to society, to tell us freedom comes only in bondage and in lack of controls. Fire these people and in a better world, chain them to the wall as traitors to human potential.
I can not fucking believe Google is carrying water for the Apple abomination like this.
> We remain concerned that these changes to Search are a result of the DMA prioritizing the commercial interests of a small set of intermediary sites — who often shout the loudest in these debates — over the ability of most businesses to sell directly to their customers.
Say Google ... of all people. I would be ashamed working for a company and writing this shit. Ashamed of myself!
Section 230: time for a reset
Off topic but can we acknowledge how insane it is that Google gets its own TLD?
https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs...
https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en
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You too could have your own TLD.
Huh - just made me wonder, why didn't Musk buy .X tld ? Far better than x.com
Then again, what would've been the domain name, x.x ? oh boy.
Nice idea but expressly prohibited by ICANN. Must be 3+ letters.
"Applied-for gTLD strings in ASCII must be composed of three or more visually distinct characters. Two-character ASCII strings are not permitted, to avoid conflicting with current and future country-codes based on the ISO 3166-1 standard."
If only the US had some kind if law to limit the power of a single company over markets a broad as "information services"
>Lower quality online services: People in the EU need up to 50% more searches to find what they need when they search for hotels, restaurants and things to buy.
The EU is wasting their citizens time with this law. It should be reverted as the current version is hurting consumers.