Comment by drooopy
5 days ago
I don't understand meta's statement that this handicaps american businesses while allows European and Chinese companies to operate under different standards.
5 days ago
I don't understand meta's statement that this handicaps american businesses while allows European and Chinese companies to operate under different standards.
It's not completely unwarranted. According to the article, Facebook was fined for their model of asking for pay or accept tracking. Which is exactly what almost all publishers do, e.g. all big German newspapers. It's absolutely clear that this is against the law - they could show ads, but can't invade the users privacy for that, so no tracking ads - but they do it anyway and got away with it in various decisions. And now Facebook gets a huge fine for the same behaviour.
Which is good in a way, maybe it will lead to a behaviour correction also for the smaller publishers. But it's of course not an equal treatment.
Apple on the other hand completely deserves its fine, without a question. They got clear rules and did everything to circumvent them. The Apple's Core Technology Fee was obviously illegal. Don't know why they expected to get away with that, there wasn't even a minimal chance of that working. Idiots.
Big German newspapers do not need to comply under DMA.
The EU focusses, rightfully, on EU macro dynamics with these laws, not how smaller outlets work.
This is very much reasonable. When a platform is big, it has bigger impact, but also bigger budgets to hire legal help and bigger budgets to stay compliant.
This is well established in accounting where there exists different rules depending on size (in many jurisdictions)
What’s another example of different rules depending on size? “Content Moderation” I think? Anything outside the DMA? I think small companies get some exceptions for documentation requirements?
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In practice it means that only American companies end up paying large fees to the EU.
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I agree, except the DMA specifically only applies to companies over a specific size. I think if the German newspapers were at FB/Apple scale, in terms of number of users, then the DMA would apply (i.e. they would be designated gatekeepers or similar) and they could also be fined. Although I think pay for no ads is also a violation of GDPR maybe?
Pay for no tracking / Personal Information trade is illegal. Pay for no advertising is legal. That's what Youtube is doing.
It's meta's "pay or allow us to sell your personal informations that is the issue, not advertising by itself.
Exactly. While DMA does not apply, GDPR does. But it gets ignored and weakened by decision against the letter and the spirit of the law - which does not surprise if you realize how much power those legacy publishers hold. Not so FB, not here at least.
So it's not exactly the same regulation but pretty much the same situation. I'd also be pissed.
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The measures apply by size, not by country of origin. It happens that the companies over the threshold are American. So their statement is basically untrue, but that's politics these days.
There are a couple of companies in the list[1] (of seven) that aren’t US-based. ByteDance are Chinese and Booking are EU (NL).
[1] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
Probably also important to note, is that ByteDance and TikTok are also currently being investigated by the European Commission. Although for different reasons under the Digital Services Act - so it's not like they are targeting US companies specifically with the law.
Also the commission is known to fine European entities all the time for various reasons, one of the recent ones I can think of is Pierre Cardin and it's partners for restricting cross border European sales.
Booking Holdings which Wikipedia has as the parent of booking.com seems to be US owned.
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Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses. Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
> EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices.
Users are free to just not buy iOS devices. Users are free to just not use Meta services.
There is no monopoly here. This is all much ado about nothing.
No real-world user is meaningfully harmed by the current state of Apple App Store/Meta Ads, but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common. Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
> The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses.
Except Booking (~EU, based in NL~*) falls under the DMA, and ByteDance (China? I think) does as well. All the same restrictions fall on them too.
> Users are free to just not use Meta services.
True in theory, not so much in practice. I work for a company that deals directly with WhatsApp in NL, and I guarantee you for businesses it's a death knell to not have a WA Business presence. Even the local gemeente (aka city council) and other gov't establishments are on WhatsApp too. Recently more people are moving onto Signal and Telegram, but that remains a minority.
Don't even get me started on Asia, especially India/Indonesia, where even despite the existence of Line and similar apps everything is still* almost exclusively on WA. A bit different in East Asia where Line and other apps are more predominant (hardly relevant for the EU though).
Spotify doesn't fall under the DMA because it's not gatekeeping anything and it does have plenty of competition, many of which pay artists better and have basically equal selections. YT Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, Bandcamp and I'm sure dozens and dozens of others all exist and are used.
> ... but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common
Interesting how this evil sideloading boogeyman hasn't happened on Android.
> ... Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement
The same small businesses that are forced into paying 30% to Apple/Google for simply existing on their app store?
> (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
So, the gatekeepers as listed under the DMA? Y'know, the giants that literally hold all the keys and can dictate how the entire market should work based on their rules? The very same ones that have opaque ad-bidding systems that they control inside-and-out and can do anything they want to with?
[**] Seems I'm wrong there (See andsoitis' reply to my comment), but didn't want to edit out my original comment.
Regardless, calling it gerrymandering of local businesses is simply incorrect, and I can speak for at least myself that if we even had any tech companies that big (and I hope we never do), we'd expect them be subject to the exact same rules and laws.
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Spotify feels like a slightly marginal case, and it wouldn't be surprising to see it added to the list. It clearly wasn't big enough a few years back when all this was being defined, but it's gotten quite a lot bigger since.
I'm curious, what is your preferred financial regime? EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices. Do you find that wrong in general?
Perhaps you prefer an industro-fascist regime where businesses are not bound by any tailored laws? Pretty sure there would already be alternative iOS app stores under such a regime - government controls (IPR system, computer security laws) seem necessary to enable these sorts of tech monopolies.
> Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
The EU's budget is massive, no shortfall is covered by these fines since to collect them it takes another massive legal battle, that's just bullshit being regurgitated on the internet (especially on this forum). If that was the case the EU would be issuing GDPR fines all over the place to cover shortfalls, it doesn't happen in reality.
> Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.
Spotify does not behave like the most similar category covered by the DMA: video sharing like YouTube. Spotify does not hold exclusive access to the content and the audience, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and other players have almost the same catalogue as Spotify has so users are free to move between those services without penalty. Now try moving from YouTube to a competitor, a completely different beast.
The DMA exists to counter an imbalance in the power these massive tech companies have in detriment to competition, it's quite a simple prerogative, Spotify doesn't hold at all the same power as YouTube has, or Google Search, or any other platform under the DMA.
> Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.
If that would be the case, the EU could be drowning in money by being more aggressive with GDPR enforcement and follow-through.
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