Comment by earthnail
2 days ago
Surprised by the negative comments here. Usually HN univocally complains about Apple‘s dominant App Store. Now a government fines them for it and some people are upset?
2 days ago
Surprised by the negative comments here. Usually HN univocally complains about Apple‘s dominant App Store. Now a government fines them for it and some people are upset?
It is a nationalistic thing. When foreign governments fine "American" companies, they get all up in arms, while constantly asking the US Government to provide better consumer protections and promote competition.
This position commonly ignores that these fines are against these companies position within the market for which they're fined. Meaning that the EU will look at the EU profits and fine relative to those, so they aren't fining the "American" side/profits of the company but rather their "EU" (or Italian in this case) balance sheet.
The EU moved to fining on the basis of global revenues a long time ago to avoid companies using accounting to hide local revenues and avoid fines.
Then again, it could be seen as a tit for tat move regarding how the US applied its laws extraterritorialy using the dollar as a medium so it's bit harsh to complain about the EU when the US started the whole thing.
This whole procedure started after Meta (that meta) reported apple to the authority, it's not even an investigation that was started by the authority of its own volition
Meta reported that they had to ask users for permission before being allowed to track what users were doing on their device.
This is literally about users having the ability to say no.
> When foreign governments fine "American" companies, they get all up in arms
Which is ironic, because Apple is more aligned with China than the US:
Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
EU doesn't fine relative to EU profits, it fines relative to global revenue.
You confidently state that EU fines relative to global revenue, but you are wrong.
The case linked above is an Italian competition authority, so I'm any case, no EU level calculation.
There are various legal bases applicable at EU level (competition, GDPR, ...) so depending on the case which rules are applied varies. But in general these guidelines apply, which explicitly state the basis as follows:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
> In determining the basic amount of the fine to be imposed, the Commission will take the value of the undertaking's sales of goods or services to which the infringement directly or indirectly relates in the relevant geographic area within the EEA. It will normally take the sales made by the undertaking during the last full business year of its participation in the infringement (hereafter ‘value of sales’).
E.g. most recent EU cases as per their press website note that they applied these guidelines:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_... https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
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You shouldn't be surprised. Almost every single story involving the EU and Apple that I've seen over the past few years was full of low effort responses and generic rants about the EU by people who clearly haven't read past the title, especially when it comes to fines.
Take your pick: "EU is fining us to finance itself", "EU can't innovate", "I can't believe that EU is fining Apple for [gross misunderstanding of the situation]"
I think people would sympathize more if it was something like "Apple makes choosing a different default browser or email client unnecessarily cumbersome" --
instead of "Apple makes you double-opt-in to sharing your private data with even more advertisers"
But that's not the story here. I hate ads as much as anyone, but this action is a matter of market competition, not privacy. They're completely different fights and intelligent people ought to be able to distinguish between the two. Anti-competitive behavior by Google, Apple, Meta, etc. is what got us into this mess with tracking and privacy violations in the first place.
It's the market for privacy violations. I'd go so far as to say that improving competitiveness in this market probably makes the world worse, by making privacy violations more profitable. If they had fined them for not allowing sideloading, or not allowing third-party payments, it would be a different story. Those are markets I want to see grow and thrive.
2 replies →
> this action is a matter of market competition, not privacy
Nope.
This is literally about apps having to ask the user for permission before they can track them.
1 reply →
When Apple introduced these changes, rates for Apple Search Ads tripled.
Because Apple Search Ads are offered by the same company that sold you the device, they are legally not a “third party” service. Apple still tracks your installs, your revenue, your retention period, etc, and uses it for Apple Search Ads. Developers can see these metrics for their own apps.
You can’t opt out of this.
> Usually HN univocally complains about Apple‘s dominant App Store.
There is a strong population on HN that dislikes walled gardens. In my experience there are also plenty of people who disagree. There's also a large population that doesn't like EU tech regulations.
The ratio between different parts of the HN population can change significantly depending of stuff like time of day and headline draw. I don't find it particularly surprising, it isn't like HN is a monolith with internally consistent views across the entire population.
Ok, but can you give me an example of even ONE specific commenter who has made inconsistent comments on this topic in different threads?
“HN” is lots of different people with lots of different opinions. Different threads select for different commentators. This is not unusual (nor has it been the other thousand times people have commented on the inconsistency of HN).
These posts should really have a poll on HN, so we know what HN thinks about the case.
Why does it matter what others on HN think? Either you find a comment insightful, read it, upvote and move on. Or it isn't, or maybe it's outright wrong, and you try to correct it. Or you found some question in your head, so you ask that.
Not once have I wondered what "HN at large thinks" because it simply doesn't matter. What HN-the-collective thinks about things-in-general just isn't interesting, people's individual thoughts and opinions though, is so much more valuable to read and interesting.
Polls would be just as inconsistent as the comments. Individual contributors would be consistent, but different polls would select for different contributors.
I don’t think it’s surprising. The ideal setup for many people here is an OS that gives them control over what they run and over their data.
An App Store that restrict us from running the application we want is bad. An App Store that prevents applications from tracking us is good. The former restricts our freedom, the latter restricts the freedom of developers who want to take advantage of our data.
It wasnt until recently that we could even have emulators to play old video games we grew up with, instead of having to buy "clones" one by one for $5/piece. The only thing that was protecting was Apple's profits
Except the Apple App Store literally tracks you, which in turn powers Apple Search Ads.
As the platform owner, they explicitly reserve the right to do this - see also Meta, Google, Amazon, etc.
Apple collects data, but they usually keep it for their own use, that's the difference.
Third parties trying to do the same level of collection and also share it with partners is the issue. As such, the platform owner putting constraints on them by applying rules related to privacy shouldn't surprise anyone.
If it does, you're not paying enough attention.
Have you ever read a comment in favour of Apple Store ads? Every time the topic is discussed here the opinion is very negative.
What I said it’s that I don’t find it surprising that people generally dislike the App Store but that they also aren’t against limiting tracking from apps.
This one's getting negative reception because the optics are crap. I've ranted plenty about Apple, but ATT is a great thing and I don't see how it's “abusing market position”. Like, just don't track people across the web and then you don't need to show the ATT pop-up?
It's almost like the stories on HN always attract more nay-sayers/detractors/negative nancies than positive ones, so if you just go by "general vibe of the comment section by submission theme", it'll always look like HN has split personality disorder, while in reality HN is composed of a wide range of diverse individuals :)
I think comments on pretty much everything skew negative. There’s not much to say if you support the fine.
It's almost like HN is a (semi-)large community with many different viewpoints!
probably due to this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/linasbeliunas_insane-the-eu-n...
EU now makes more money fining US tech than it does taxing its own public internet companies
That is a false post. That is not all public tech companies from the EU.
The post you link, and the following comments, directly contradict what you are saying.