Just FYI, Felix Reda was a member of the European Parliament and was responsible there for the copyright reform and also involved in GDPR, massively stepping on the feet of big tech. Don't know if it was your intention to include them in a list of people wo "shill" for big tech, but they shouldn't be included.
Personally, I enjoy the fact that it's generating songs about topics I'd find it funny to have a song about. My dog playing with their friends, a song about a funny situation that happened. So it's mostly the part about hearing something that's personal to me being put into a song. I'll listen to it a few times, send it around and be done with it. It'll never go into my daily-listening queue, will not replace the emotional connection I have with songs that helped me through bad times. It's just a fun tool to make something "personal" that I'd never ever would hire an artist for anyways.
To me that's a really weird analogy. Nobody would think about putting a gasoline tank and pump in their garage ... There's plenty of public charging infrastructure in Europe. Fast charging on the highways, slow charging in living areas. Even many supermarkets offer fast chargers now, so that during your grocery shopping trip you can get most of your charging needs covered. There's plenty of opportunities to charge your vehicle over night, or really quickly when needed. It's absolutely possible to own an EV without a garage
Nope, not even in Switzerland its good enough and covered enough. Maybe for some folks, but not good enough for others.
What I see is how rich folks buying these (since these have TCO cost 2-4x as much as buying a solid used car every 10 years and servicing that with a good non-brand service, ie good BMWs are great at this) end up being proverbial slaves to their cars. Effin' car, like we are not enslaved with enough gizmos. Additional mental calculations compared to owning ICE cars re range if your commute is in tens of kms and not merely kms, forced to do stops on longer routes as car needs, not as the people riding it need.
I see it as adding tons complexity into our lives, and we are working hard on opposite direction.
Here (Slovenia) that is a lot of hassle for no personal benefit. Public charging is expensive enough that you'll never recuperate the higher price of the vehicle (if you can't charge at home).
You leave your car parked outside at a slow 22kW charger. But with a full BEV, you don't need to charge every night, just like you don't need to fill up your gasoline car every evening in your own garage.
There are only parking space with charging available for 2 cars in a 4km radius in my neighborhood. Charging that is anyway nit cost effective.
YMMV but afaik in europe there are still plenty of places where using an EV wouldn't be practical at all, even in urban area.
The only EV that I am considering is the Silence S01 moped and the reason is that its battery can be unmounted and be carried around as a trolley luggage so I could charge it inside my building.
>There are only parking space with charging available for 2 cars in a 4km radius in my neighborhood. Charging that is anyway not cost effective.
I wonder if the two things are related. There are hundreds of EV chargers within 4km of where I live and on average they are 20-50% cheaper than charging at home (with the exception of fast chargers, which are pretty expensive).
Even if the price were right, would I want to have to check every couple of hours if the parking space is available for me to charge my vehicle? These parking spaces are mostly used by visitors because EVs aren't convenient enough for locals.
I'm not going to argue that public EV charging is always convenient. It certainly sounds like it isnt where you are.
But where I am, >95% of chargers have real time availability via app or web. You can schedule notifications for when a charger is free, and some charging networks even let you reserve chargers ahead of time.
I live in a major European city. If I wanted to charge an electric car it would be at least a kilometers away and is often unavailable.
The comparison to gas is irrelevant and nonsensical since it takes minutes to fill up and gas stations are plenty. If I had an electric car I would want to charge it overnight near my home. That is not possible for me and I don't see that it is possible for many others.
>There's plenty of opportunities to charge your vehicle over night
A kilometer away and I would occupy that spot for the entire night. It is pretty obvious why I would not do that.
I don't really care about your theory crafting what I could and could not do. It is obvious that this is the reason Hybrid owners don't use their electric mode as often, since they can avoid going to great lengths to charge their car.
In Germany you get tax benefits when buying a plugin hybrid instead of a pure gasoline car ... There's always been the legend that people return their leased PHEVs and the charging cable is still wrapped in plastic in the trunk and has never been used. Maybe there's some truth to this after all.
I guess the subsidy is too high if people bought these in preference to conventional ICE and then didn't take advantage of the improved mileage.
I am not entirely sure what the government could have done instead. Subsidizing public charging might have worked better - free fuel is a strong incentive - but then maybe people simply drive more. Or perhaps more likely they buy a hybrid thinking they'll charge it but find it to inconvenient.
As a car owner, I wish to see governments to invest in public transport. Cars mean freedom, and I love mine, but we shouldn't really use them for regular routes, like for commuting to work.
If you don't want a third party app store, don't install one. TaDa ... Nothing changes for you. Now let the rest of the people, that want to use THEIR phone as THEY want, let them.
Well, thank you for "oversimplifying it"
But, the existence of a 3rd party app store, with "zero cost" to developers apparently, would almost certainly force someone in need of an app for some purpose to use this app store.
If I have a tool, lets say I buy a 'doorbell' camera. Right now, the "app" must be curated and qualified and verified clear of defects, malware, etc by App store policy and review. (not that they are 100%, but it's a pretty decent process).
When a 'free app store' shows up, then this same doorbell camera company will just pop their app, which will become a much shittier version of what would have been available, into some shitty app store, and, not bother to make a better version.
What will happen, in practice, is that there will be some percentage of apps that become shittier and only available from the shitty 3rd party store, and not the curated (and not free) app store.
So, no, it won't be a simple matter of just "don't use that store", there will be more factors at play.
At least for Germany there are cases, where police officers have leaked information about people that they have access to through their systems. Especially leaking data about political opponents to certain groups.
I don't know which case you're thinking of but generally the trend seems to be police officers leaking data about (perceived) left-wing activists to far-right groups.
There is a known far-right extremism problem in the German police force and military, e.g. the founder of GSG9 (think German SWAT) and a brigadier general and former commander of the KSK (think German SOCOM/SEAL) published a book with a far-right publishing house, which was the first in a series of incidents that led to the KSK being reformed in 2020 to (hopefully) address the systemic far-right extremism problem.
There have been credible claims of ties of far-right terrorist groups like Combat 18 and NSU 2.0 to the police. E.g. in one of the biggest news stories there was a find of not only a disturbing cache of weapons and body bags but also "kill lists" found to be sourced from police computers.
There are obvious ideological reasons why police officers are more likely to be supportive of far-right extremism than, say, far-left extremism. That isn't to say police officers are generally far-right but maintaining the status quo, opposing disturbances of the public order and enforcing the letter of the law fit better with conservatism than progressivism and social justice movements, let alone radical leftism.
> provides developers through ongoing investments in the tools, technologies, and services that enable them to build and share innovative apps with users around the world.
That's what the 99$ fee for the developer program is for. The 50ct Core Technology Fee is just Apple showing the middle finger to successful developers. I hope the EU goes after this fee first.
The whole reason for the DMA is that developers do not use Apple's platforms to bring apps to the user's devices.
The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.
Yeah this is what I really don't understand. They say they have to be compensated for their R&D work and for providing the APIs and cloud services etc. Okay.
They have to be "compensated" in the intellectual property[0] sense of "we reserve the right to invent new reasons why we need to be compensated". Nothing is ever truly "paid for" or "owned" here.
I’m not sure what % of their R&D budget comes from the $99 fee vs various other AppStore percentage based fees. But… should it be a flat fee? It seems sort of reasonable to charge more successful apps more, they are apparently benefiting more from the ecosystem, right? Like progressive taxation. (If anything, why not institute increasing developer “apple tax” brackets?)
It looks like, just from some random googling, Apple makes somewhere in the range of $85B per year from their App Store, and there are around 34 Million iOS app developers. Do people really want to pay north of $2000 for their developer licenses?
I think you'd be hard pressed to take the $99/yr they make from the dev program fee and use it to cover the salaries for the engineers implementing and maintaining all of iOS' developer-facing APIs.
Who decided that developers should be the ones paying for the development of those APIs in the first place? Are we just going to ignore Apple's own products and services that their platform allows them to profit off of? And the market share afforded to them by supporting popular third-party apps and services?
There's plenty of precedence for platforms being profitable even with free APIs - including Android, Windows, and even Apple's own MacOS. iOS is not special.
Apple would pay for those APIs whether or not the dev program fees alone were enough to cover the expenses. But they'll also take as much from the devs as they are legally allowed to. And if the fees are enough to keep devs from distributing outside the app store, even better for Apple.
Isn't having good apps/api a selling point for apple hardware (where they already make massive amount of money), why can't that be a motivation by itself?
and what about the devices itself? doesn't apple get money from selling iphones and ipads?
The only downside I see on the DMA is that it has come very late, and that it's only an european law. Mobile devices are computers, and once sold you should be able to install whatever you want like on any other computer. The shame on apple is that it is increasingly difficult to install software even on the computers.
Maybe Apple's goal is to become irrelevant enough to not be subjected to the DMA. I mean, making developers despise you is a brilliant first step towards such an end!
Why is size a question here? If apple is subject now, but then dropped to 1/10th the number of users, could they suddenly no longer be required to adhere to the DMA? Why is the size of the provider suddenly a test to determine if consumer protections are in order?
The DMA, digital markets act, is about fair competition, not consumer protection. If you got 5 users, you do not have the necessary leverage to matter.
> The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.
pretty much the same way nintendo or sony or microsoft justify it, I'd think.
it's pretty much exactly the same thing as windows S edition, or a console - you paid for the laptop, the developer paid to get notarization to release it. As Android shows, it is also probably legal to refuse to unlock the bootloader... now you own an "appliance".
And again, consoles have been doing this for two full decades now. PS5 isn't sold at a loss (and I don't think it matters if it is - your business model is not my problem) but I can't go mine crypto or emulate games on a PS5 or Xbox even if that's what I want to do with it as a user.
And I know that consoles got a specific carveout in the DMA "for some reason" (more evidence this is really just a bill of attainder in generic dress) but really there is not a moral difference here, and people have (including here, including the apple haters) have generally convinced themselves that it's OK. It's simple, just do the same thing with apple: "my phone is an appliance and I don't need to emulate games to be happy with it". It's a console in my pocket that makes calls.
In the EU, the spirit of the laws is what counts in court, not the letter of the law. That means it's a lot easier to understand things if you start with the intended consequences:
Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here
Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this
“The spirit of the law thing” is something I’ve seen repeated WRT the EU, but it seems like a really bizarre way to run anything important. The law obviously can’t tell us what its spirit is beyond what the letter is.
We can guess what legislators want… I guess a lawyer must have come up with this idea, because inconsistent guesses are going to give them lots of extra business.
Maybe it would be better to annotate laws with what their spirit is, so we don’t have to guess. In fact, just write that down instead of the apparently non-functional letter of the law.
You as a consumer or business cannot do the interpretation. Courts do. When there is ambiguities in the law (i.e. if the CTF is a valid fee or not), the higher courts (like the CJEU) decide how the law is to be interpreted and their decision sort of amend the word of the law.
> Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here
> Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this
this is a silly false dilemma/double standard you've set up.
if you want to apply the "do I need this exact device" standard - then no, you do not need a PS5, and you do not need an iphone. Therefore there is no need for regulation.
if you want to apply the "can I live my life without this whole category of Thing" - you probably can't live your life without some form of entertainment, and some form of generalized computing device, right? So no, you can't "do without" something like a PS5 or a phone or a laptop, no.
And the Xbox and PS5 are general purpose computing devices - there is no technical reason you shouldn't be able to check emails or run a word processor on your Xbox, other than that's not the market segmentation MS wants. Again, this is an example of a device so successfully convincing people that it's really an appliance that literally the EU wrote it into a law that there's no need for this appliance to comply.
Again: what's the problem? Just do the same thing with the iphone.
regardless, you are choosing to ignore the whole point about Windows S - you certainly can't life your life without Windows or MacOS, right? And if you want to point to niche solutions... nobody is stopping you from buying a Sailphone, but you would probably agree that's not a sufficient solution for the market as a whole.
Again, the whole thing is very narrowly a bill of attainder, both in its written form and application. If the purpose is "protecting consumers" there is no logical reason to exclude Windows S or PS5 or Xbox or other general-purpose computing devices from being utilized as such by consumers.
The EU has no business to be declaring these classes of devices as having no need to comply with market act requirements, especially when the boundaries are so fuzzy. Apple TV is pushing into mobile gaming. Series S is pushing downwards into mobile gaming. What is the difference between these 2 classes of devices, why should one get a pass? Why should Motorola be allowed to refuse to unlock their bootloaders without voiding a warranty? Etc etc. Literally narrowly targeted at ios and nothing else - even when it would benefit the consumer.
And more generally people are deliberately (and knowingly) missing the point that these types of appliances are common and are widely accepted - literally so widely accepted that the EU wrote special permission for many of them. Phrasing it as if Apple is somehow uniquely denying users access to the capabilities of their hardware is incredibly misleading - literally the EU wrote into the DMA special permission for many vendors to continue denying their users access to the capabilities of their hardware.
But, it's apple, I get it, everyone hates apple. But at a technological level they're not special or different.
Everyone knows the problem has nothing to do with openness or whatever, but that it comes down to the 30% fee and companies not wanting to pay it.
The problem is the law isn’t written to say “30% fees are too damn high” and just mandate that the fees can’t be over X% or are capped at $Y per install/device/whatever.
Game distribution
Steam 30% (25% after $10M, 20% after $50M)
Epic 12%
Humble 25% (15% to Humble, 10% to charity)
GOG 30%
Console
Microsoft 30%
Playstation 30%
Xbox 30%
Nintendo 30%
Mobile
Apple 30%
Google 30%
Physical
Gamestop 30%
Amazon 30%
Best Buy 30%
Walmart 30%
