Apple and Microsoft Say Flagship Services Not Popular Enough To Be 'Gatekeepers'...
source link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/23/09/04/2030248/apple-and-microsoft-say-flagship-services-not-popular-enough-to-be-gatekeepers
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Apple and Microsoft Say Flagship Services Not Popular Enough To Be 'Gatekeepers'
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Hopefully no one caves in on this. There could be a meaningful impact.
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Letting the largest monopoly of all: government determine how a private company manages its own assets. Communism much?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
There's zero similarity between a system designed to abolish private property and regulations limiting monopolistic behavior to encourage competition between privately-held companies.
Imagine a law telling Comcast/AT&T they aren't allowed to buy a small independent ISP if the region it services has fewer than two other providers. That's what this EU law is like. Imagine a different law that said consumers can only get Internet service from the state-provided service, period. That's what communism is like. -
Actually having a government determine how a private companies manages its own assets is a necessary component of capitalism. Capitalism in its raw form results in a single stable condition: a singular monopoly with price and conditions set by provider's will alone. No country on this planet under any form economic political system practices pure capitalism. They are all what you insanely describe as communism.
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I'm sorry? Are you new to planet Earth?
Capitalism has zero inclination to competition when left to its own devices. What do you think mergers and takeovers are? Improving competition by... [checks notes].... reducing competition.
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You might not like capitalism, but you don't have to lie so stupidly about it. That is not a stable equilibrium for some of [wikipedia.org] the same reasons that government owning and running everything fails: diseconomies of scale [investopedia.com].
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I would say that Bing is actually a gatekeeper, it keeps people locked into Google and, for a certain market segment, DDG.
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Yes, these governments could get away with blatantly protectionist and anti-American rulemaking again! (What, you thought local companies would be considered gatekeepers, or face the same scale of penalties as companies from across the Atlantic? Oh, you sweet summer child.)
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I'm using a Mac right now and I'm able to buy software from other stores such as Steam, Itch, Humble, etc. There's even an open source Mac package manager [brew.sh].
iPhone, sure, that's a walled garden.
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> Microsoft's search engine Bing
Yes. Who the heck uses Bing and who the heck is locked into it ? The EU being its usual ridiculous self.
Apple iMessage is also somewhat of a moot issue. I've never had any issues with people on Android texting me.
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You must not communicate with people who use emojis.
I regularly had to communicate with the operations manager at a client. She'd regularly respond to my messages with hearts, googly eyes, and other...odd choices.
One day I was in the building when she responded and I asked her to pull up iMessage. Sure enough, she was responding with "thumbs up" or "fireworks" or some nonsense...and I showed her how it showed up on my phone. She was embarrassed and stopped responding with emojis.
Gotta love that Apple-
Does your device or texting app not using Unicode? Most emojis are part of the standard and I've never experienced this problem. Either your anecdote is at least a decade old or I'd have to say you're full of shit.
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> You must not communicate with people who use emojis.
So iMessage uses a different format than UTF-8 ?
> Gotta love that Apple elitism.
I absolutely loathe Apple and if the issue is different emojis showing up in an SMS vs an iMessage, that's Apple not implementing UTF-8 properly.
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Even ignoring the green vs blue bubble, there are technical limitations that exist when messaging with someone outside of the Apple ecosystem. It's possible that the ability alone to send messages may be enough, or it might not.
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> It's possible that the ability alone to send messages may be enough, or it might not.
What value does iMessage even provide ? What does it lock you into ?
This is just government overreach on topics it doesn't understand.
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The fact that you don't know, or choose to ignore, the rather widely known concerns means that maybe you aren't the best person to be commenting on who does/doesn't understand.
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> the rather widely known concerns
If you can't even name one, seems they're not that widely known nor real concerns.
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If you can't be arsed to educate yourself on a topic, it seems you shouldn't be commenting on it.
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> If you can't be arsed to educate yourself on a topic
Typical "I have no argument so I'll gaslight you" response.
I am educated on the topic. iMessage is basically SMS that work over WiFi as long as both devices are Apple devices. If I'm stuck on a WiFi only network and want to message a friend, I'll probably use one of 50 other messaging services that work over the Internet to reach them, even if they happen to own an Apple device and I have access to an Apple device.
There's no "gatekeeping" with iMess
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No, it's a typical do your own legwork response. It took me literally seconds to type it into Google before I responded. If that is too much work for you, that is your problem.
None of that is relevant, or at least primarily relevant, to the purpose of the EU's DMA. It exists as a way to mitigate monopolistic behavior. Requiring interoperability is one way in which they intend to enforce it.
First, the use of gatekeeper in regards to the DMA is different. As for there being "gatekeeping" with iMessage, that i
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The only complaint I really have against iMessage is that it's a silo.
I can't replace it with another app, and I can't independently backup or index my iMessages (eg. as I used to do with messages sent to me on Android - it was nice to be able to have full-text search independent of my messages so I could find context I'd forgotten about).
And it'd be nice to use eg. something like Signal instead (not that that's possible anymore on Android, anyway).
It's a pretty moot point. I'd hardly consider iMessage any sort of 'gatekeeper' technology. There's nothing novel or special about it, in 2023.
Their trackpad and the ability to copy/paste between different Apple devices, however? Those absolutely are gatekeeper tech, and are completely indispensable.
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Not in EU. That's almost entirely the world of whatsapp. No one cares about iMessage or RCS, because everyone is on whatsapp anyway.
Notably, just like the rest of the world. US is pretty much the only nation in the world where native messaging software somehow manages to remain relevant, rather than get displaced by whatsapp, telegram, wechat and other certain language specific options.
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Spin control artistry in action.
The list of gatekeeping and proprietary, customer enslaving options for both these (and Google and more) are legendary.
As a US Citizen, I can tell you that the EU just doesn't put up with the bullshit that is business-as-usual in the US. These gatekeeping, customer corralling methods are used across the product lines, hardware on all their OS platforms, and software supply chains.
This is historical, continues, and won't abate until they feel financial pain, because they feel
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> The list of gatekeeping and proprietary, customer enslaving options for both these (and Google and more) are legendary.
Ok, but those weren't named. They named specifically iMessage and Bing.
Don't accuse a man who's never robbed anything of burglary if you mean to punish him for murder.
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A rose by any other name....
It takes a while, and legislation and legal prosecution will always be behind the state of the art. They pick their emblems, their standards, and run with them.
Did they pick some that weren't as juicy as say, proprietary fonts in M365? Maybe that's next; not my choice. I speculate that this is the beginning of a long line of EU enforcement actions that they believe by their values will result in the intent desired by them.
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> It takes a while, and legislation and legal prosecution will always be behind the state of the art
Behind ?
When was Bing dominant and when did Bing "enslave" their captive consummers ?
Oh right never. Ever.
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Bing was a default search engine in IE and in Edge. The EU initially championed choice during the search engine wars. For ages, Microsoft swore up and down that Windows would simply not work with IE, and wants very much to constantly push Edge as a default choice, even when defaults have been changed.
Using Cortana like Alexa was another head-desk. But you're quibbling without reading about what the history of the EU initiative is, only championing Bing like a MS sock puppet.
Apple has their own difficulties
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Being locked into it has nothing to do with the regulations.
And so because one feature works for you the company should be exempt from all regulations of the DMA?
Slashdotters are being their usual ridiculous self, prattling on about something they evidently have no clue about, and in this case I'm not even sure you know what is being discussed, let alone how it works.
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> And so because one feature works for you the company should be exempt from all regulations of the DMA?
If they are single company regulations that basically handicap one company in the market ?
Yes. Absolute-fucking-ly. "We made this law for this product of X company" is absolute government fuckery of the highest order.
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> and interoperability
iMessage interops with everything else through SMS. So again, moot point.
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If Microsoft hadn't raised the issue I doubt anyone there would have remembered Bing even existed.
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Windows has an almost 100% market share, so that should be considered a gatekeeper.
Same goes for MS Office. Nobody uses the viable alternatives, because they all been reduced to irrelevance by MS.
Microsoft should get a massive fine over monopoly abuse for just these two systems.
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It is considered a gatekeeper thanks to the requirement to have a Microsoft account. TFA even says MS isn't disputing Windows.
The story here is that companies are trying to get some of their less popular products exempt, not that the rules don't apply to their large products.
Nothing here has been abused and no regulation has been broken (yet). If you want to talk about monopolies and antitrust go find an article about it and post it to Slashdot so we can have a relevant discussion. What you're talking about
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So mine will sell better. I think the government should make it so.
This is the stupidest thing ever.
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The difference is maybe that Megadeth doesn't own the music studios so they can push their records and pretty much drown out those that would actually be better than theirs.
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Are you fucking serious? Not Office, not Teams, not their fucking operating system that has pretty much every business by the balls? Of all the things they could investigate for abuse of a monopoly in MS, and would offer a very good reason to do that, they choose exactly the one that they do not have a monopoly at?
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It does seem rather weird. I assume the EU tries to do the verbal gymnastics to make the rule apply to Office and/or Windows, but couldn't figure out how to do it - however they just HAD to get Microsoft somehow, so this silliness is what they're left with.
I'm also a little surprised they hit iMessage, which certainly doesn't have even majority usage in the EU or the world at large. Likely it's the same sort of shenanigans as mentioned above re: Microsoft.
But all that is just speculation, since the linked s
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Ah - archive.is has a copy of the story - https://archive.ph/m80vf#selec... [archive.ph]
Here is the way the rules determine "gatekeeper" status (honestly, why wasn't this in TFS?):
"Platforms need to have an annual turnover of more than €7.5bn, a market cap above €75bn and 45mn active monthly users in the EU to fall under the rules, though Brussels has some discretion over the designation beyond these raw metrics."
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None of these laws have to do with majority usage, monopolies, or even specific products. This is about service providers and their total usage numbers. Nowhere is it said that this doesn't apply to Office or Windows. In fact TFA even says that Microsoft isn't even attempting to claim that Windows isn't covered (since it obviously is thanks to their forcing of a Microsoft account into their product).
The only point being made here is that MS wants a heads up in the Search space over Google by claiming their
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Bing is not being investigated for abuse. What happens is the new rules are now in force, and Bing is considered gatekeeper as per a number of monthly user larger than 45 million (full criteria here: https://www.taylorwessing.com/... [taylorwessing.com] ) Apparently Microsoft challenges this number, but I can't tell exactly because TFA is paywalled.
The possible abuse in the case of Teams was solved last week was solved 5 days ago with Microsoft unbundling it to avoid further investigation https://slashdot.org/story/23/... [slashdot.org]
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This isn't about a monopoly or monopolist practices. No one is being investigated for anything. It's about the threshold for the gatekeeper provision for the DMA in the EU. This is just MS claiming they don't want to comply with the law because apparently they want to claim that Bing has virtually zero market share, and Apple with it's 1.3billion phones are claiming that less than 3% of users are using iMessage.
Calm your tits. MS is actively being investigated for monopolistic practices for both Office and
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> MS is actively being investigated for monopolistic practices for both Office and Teams.
> Being popular isn't illegal.
You seem to have contradicted yourself in 2 sentences. Let's face it, Office and Teams aren't exactly monopolies because MS forced the issue, they just sorta became such after the competition completely sucked at providing alternatives.
The closest alternative to Teams is Discord, a service for gamers and drama queens. Even Slack, that basically copy/pasted from Discord, managed to
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The bill in question regulates "sharing data, linking to competitors", which is a limited service on Windows and Office. Bing and (hopefully) Teams are the target of this bill. Microsoft through its software, obviously has the power to demand people use Edge (in fact, they're now doing precisely that) or Teams (ditto). Edge will, also obviously, depend on another MS product, Bing. It's a circuitous way of enforcing separation that achieves a free-market outcome.
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If they're not #1 (and in these areas they are not), they're close enough that waiting would be a mistake.
They don't want to comply because they want to be exactly what the rules are meant to prevent.
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Oooh, does this mean they'll also make Facebook compatible with Twitter? TwatBook? FaceTwat?
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