The EU declares Apple's iPadOS as a 'gatekeeper' due to its vast app ecosystem, locking in businesses like yours or users like you.
The European Union's designation of Apple's iPadOS as a "gatekeeper" signals a significant win for small businesses and startup owners in fostering a fair digital marketplace.
This move further underscores the EU's commitment to regulating tech giants such as Apple and gives smaller businesses the opportunity to thrive and innovate.
Apple must now comply with the DMA within 6 months. Our CEO, @jon, welcomes this, noting that iPads and iPhones share the same ecosystem and that Apple controls both as the gatekeeper.
In light of the EU's DMA and Apple's implementation of their Browser Choice screens, our CEO and Co-Founder, Jon von Tetzchner @jon, talks to @WIRED.
"It starts from you clicking Safari. Which, I think all of us agree, that's the wrong spot." Jon said he prefers Google's implementation of its new browser choice screen that guides Android users to select a default while setting up their phone.
#SocialMedia#AdTech#Platforms#BigTech#SiliconValley: "This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you."
On some level, it's hard to even suggest we use these apps. The term "use" suggests a level of user control that Meta has spent over a decade destroying, turning Instagram and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility or have found ways to trick the algorithms into showing you their stuff.
It's the direct result of The Rot Economy, a growth-at-all-costs mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where tech companies profitably punish users as a means of showing the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means twisting platforms from offering a service to driving engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, meant finding the maximum amount of interruptions that a user will tolerate before they close the app." https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/
#Amazon#BigTech#Antitrust#Competition: "The Everything War makes a compelling case that no company should be this powerful. For many sellers, Amazon is now their main route to market. Khan’s lawsuit argues that the company has leveraged this to force them to buy other services such as advertising and fulfilment (in 2022, Amazon surpassed UPS to become America’s biggest non-governmental delivery service). Swelled by this influx, its take of sellers’ revenues rose from 19 per cent in 2014 to 45 per cent in 2023, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an anti-monopoly group, which adds that prices had to go up to offset these fees. A Borkian might argue that Amazon’s success is the reward for being efficient and raising consumer welfare. But with less and less competition providing a benchmark, these notions of welfare become very hard to gauge."
Why enshittification of the internet is progressing so quickly - options are being destroyed one by one as monopoly power exerts itself.
"...So where have the missing companies gone? A 2023 paper by a trio of academics suggests a fairly straightforward answer: the Magnificent Seven ate them. Or at least a lot of them..."
#Apple#VisionPro#AR#VR#BigTech: "The concept of the Vision Pro might have excited some developers in an Apple lab in Cupertino, but most people are never going to use computers in the way those engineers and their managers imagined. Before the 14-day return window closed, there were plenty of reports of people heading back to the Apple store or popping their headsets back in the post to get their money back. They bought into the hype, they tried the new thing, and they ultimately realized it wasn’t worth it. That’s now being reflected in the sales numbers.
Apple initially had a sales target of 3 million Vision Pro units in its first year, but slowly revised that number down to 900,000. When the product was released, estimates pegged initial sales at around 200,000 units, though it’s not clear how many of those were returned. Even people who kept their devices have recently been sharing on social media that they rarely use them anymore. It was no surprise on Tuesday when Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported Apple had slashed Vision Pro production even before its international launch, expecting to sell as little as 400,000 units this year. Kuo also suggested a cheaper version had been pushed beyond 2025, if the company makes one at all.
For some companies, selling 400,000 units would be a major achievement. But for a company like Apple that sells well over 200 million iPhones every year, along with tens of millions of Macs and iPads, it’s nowhere near the success they need it to be to justify the resources that went into it. And it’s looking ever more likely it will never get there."
The #bigtech companies have masterfully muddled the definitions of advertisement and #tracking, making them indistinguishable for a typical person. I see the #Facebook#privacy tax being compared to the #Youtube Premium all the time, so let me explain the difference and why one of them is unlawful in the eyes of #GDPR.
Co-founder of Twitter joins new Mastodon board of directors. Right, so federating with Threads wasn’t a mistake. This is just the direction Mastodon is going. Oh, well. Another Mozilla emerges.
On the other hand, it is clearly the greed of plutocrats, be it in the form of feudal lords, multinationals (#BigOil, #BigTech, ...-》 #Technofeudalism) that has brought human society to the brink of extinction and caused mass-extinction for thousands of species that were intrusted to us, at least if you belong to any religion having originated in the Middle East.
Nach meiner Ankündigung Ende April habe ich heute meine Accounts bei #WhatsApp und bei #Facebook zur "Löschung" beantragt.
Schön, dass mir #Meta nach gefühlten 4000 Klicks nochmal eine Bedenkzeit von 30 Tagen einberäumt, bis mein Account verschwunden ist. Dass die irgendwas löschen, können sie gerne dem SantaClaus erzählen, wenn sie ihn treffen.
Ein weiterer Schritt weg von #Bigtech - ein weiterer Schritt hin zu mehr Selbstbestimmung.
The successful #Mastodon and #PeerTube instances for #EU institutions run by @EDPS will be shut down on May 18th 😥
It seems that the #EuropeanCommission and #EVP have no interest in promoting independent, #bigtech-free and low-surveillance European platforms and thus a free and democratic discourse…
If you're looking for alternatives to Chrome in terms of which browsers to use on Android, Talk Android has compiled this nifty list of the latest and greatest browsers you can switch to.
✍🏾 The tech writer and journalist, Irene O., talks about how she used our highly customizable Vivaldi browser and its features, like tab stacking, and the built-in Notes and Translator.
📝 It's nice to see writers and journalists alike share their appreciation for Notes, a noteworthy tool built right into the browser. This way, there's no need to switch between apps to jot down quick notes or to add text to an existing note.
📲 It even syncs across devices making it effortless to carry all important notes on your desktop, tablet, and mobile.
Prof. David Erdos has shared his latest (excellent) research “showing i) little UK GDPR enforcement, ii) worrying gap with formal law expectations & iii) limited accountability for this.”
A less polite version would be: the 🇬🇧 government has demonstrated how a law on the books it dislikes (the General Data Protection Regulation) can be undermined by the appointment of supine or actively hostile Information Commissioners. (As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher was against its predecessor Data Protection Directive from the start; not much has changed.)
I hope the European Commission is not going down the same route with the Digital Markets Act’s Art. 7 (on NIICS interoperability), which it was hostile to from start (early 2020) to finish (enforcement). Legislators learned from the GDPR that it is too easy for national regulators to be deliberately undermined by governments looking to attract technology firm investment (see also: Ireland and Luxembourg). The Commission therefore has a central enforcement role. So I’m especially disappointed by the flimsiness of its finally-published decision not to designate iMessage as a DMA gatekeeper NIICS. It hardly justifies the “exceptional” non-designation decision (Art. 3(5)), or “manifestly call[s] into question” the quantitative tests it meets [1]. I wonder if Meta now feels slightly foolish to have obeyed that provision in (somewhat) good faith 🫠
I still remember the jaw-dropping moment the new 🇬🇧 Information Commissioner in 2009 told a law conference (just about his first public appearance) he didn’t think data protection law should apply to the private sector. (He previously ran the advertising “self-regulatory” Advertising Standards Authority.) It’s fortunate indeed for GDPR enforcement it contains rights of private action, so effectively taken up by Max Schrems. Meanwhile, the Commission’s lack of legal action to force some member states to properly implement the legislation, enchantment with mass surveillance/data retention, and some of its adequacy decisions, are much less impressive than the Court of Justice’s judgments on Schrems’ two cases.
I was reminded last week talking to a BigTech competitor these much smaller firms have to be extremely cautious about upsetting a company they may rely on for key resources, and the Commission has spent most of its time preparing for DMA enforcement talking to those two groups. So perhaps Schrems’ None of Your Business, or something similar, will have to take up the rights of the individuals the legislation is ultimately supposed to help 🤷🏻♂️ Fortunately the DMA also contains rights of private action, as well as the ability of organisations to take representative actions (thanks to campaigning by consumer and digital rights groups in its final stages). As with the Schrems I and II cases, these apparently small issues can ultimately have enormous global impact [2].
[1] Where does the DMA talk about the relative intensity of use of one core platform service versus another? This provides two of three reasons for the decision! Who cares if iMessage for Business is lightly used, given it’s likely iMessage itself is used by many microbusinesses, very few of whom I imagine were part of the “corporate users of iPhone to whom the Commission reached out during the market investigation”? Really, the EC didn’t even bother with a large-scale survey, and/or demand data from Apple?
I also heard from an impeccable source Apple threatened to withdraw iMessage from the EU if it had been DMA-designated. The EC should not be rewarding such blackmail, even if it was highly likely to be a bluff.
[2] For now, we might have to rely on technology and philanthropy to improve messenger interoperability, such as this great project: a cross-platform, memory-safe OpenMLS library to enable interoperable, end-to-end encrypted messaging (E2EE) in multiple clients, combining “Matrix’s decentralized and federated infrastructure with Signal’s low metadata footprint.” 🎯
What’s happening with TikTok in the US is a strong reminder about the vulnerability of centralized platforms to censorship and surveillance. The Open Technology Fund notes Signal “provides a high level of metadata protection, but is centralized and thus easily censored. In addition, Signal cannot efficiently provide E2EE for large-group communications.” I hope Signal will move in this direction over time, as well as towards interoperability with other platforms implementing its own protocol (with metadata guarantees) as well as the IETF’s open Messaging Layer Security standard.
I can't accept that this is where we're now, but at least you can learn a lot about opensource, community, bureaucracy, funding, boardroom drama, conflict of interests and bigtech shills just by reading this.