i’m not a fan of apple, but they do build and own their IP and i respect their right to license it on terms they decide. Is it not expropriating them to suddenly say “mighty fine business you made there mister, your competitors who happen to be our citizens would like a piece of that so how about you just hand over some chunks of it so nothing bad should happen to the rest of it?”

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plst 4 days ago | parent [-]

Their rights to license stuff they sell should not be unlimited, that's the entire point.

I understand that your second sentence refers to the fact, that the limitation is only in EU. Businesses have to respect local laws. Laws often mentioned in the thread (DMA, GDPR, although we can only suspect that these are the reasons for this lock) apply equally to everyone who wants to do business in Europe. If Apple does not want to respect these laws, they are free to leave. Even better, they can make changes to their devices that work only in EU and leave it as it already is in other countries. Said "competitors" do not necessarily need to be EU citizens, I'm sure many US companies would use that opportunity too.

Local regulations are not foreign to Apple, apparently similar laws are in force in Japan.

As for "some chunks" - interfaces are not protected by copyright, even in the US. Assuming DMA is the problem, nobody is asking for Apple to release details of their implementation, just for them to remove artificial software restrictions that lock apps from other vendors from doing (a small subset!) of stuff only Apple can do.

Smartphones are general computing devices. Apple and Google are a duopoly in the smartphone market, while restricting what users can do with their devices more than Microsoft ever restricted what Windows users can do with Windows. If we continue allowing these companies to go in that direction, we will end up with computers that are as limited as game consoles are, Apple and Google will be the only beneficiaries of that situation.

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coderatlarge 3 days ago | parent [-]

there are just and unjust laws.

i agree that to operate in a country (or block of countries) a company must be prepared to respect even the unjust laws. which apple has obviously been willing to do all day long in many parts of the world.

in this case, it really seems to me like the EU is harming consumers who benefit from the coherently-designed, safe (as compared to androland) walled garden in favor of some fairly overtly xenophobic power play against incumbents local champions cannot compete with on the merits. IMO this type of action directly invites retaliation against European companies and interests abroad.

in the related cases of airdrop interop and alternate stores, it is certainly being required that apple release its proprietary IP to competitors.

there are plenty of hungry competitors in the smartphone market beyond apple and google including Samsung huawei and scores of others.

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plst 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't find the laws unjust in any way. Apple did everything they could to take half of the smartphone market, and to me it's totally understandable that the EU government may want to limit their power over this market.

> in this case, it really seems to me like the EU is harming consumers who benefit from the coherently-designed, safe (as compared to androland) walled garden in favor of some fairly overtly xenophobic power play against incumbents local champions cannot compete with on the merits. IMO this type of action directly invites retaliation against European companies and interests abroad.

Apple consumers will still be able to benefit from this amazing walled garden by choosing not to buy non-Apple devices. Other consumers will be able to choose other vendors that will be able to fully interoperate with Apple devices. I don't see any loses for current Apple consumers.

As for the retaliation. Maybe. Remains to be seen. Introducing any regulations brings risk.

> in the related cases of airdrop interop and alternate stores, it is certainly being required that apple release its proprietary IP to competitors

What proprietary IPs?

> there are plenty of hungry competitors in the smartphone market beyond apple and google including Samsung huawei and scores of others.

In terms of operating systems you have these two. I don't think Huawei counts, aren't they sanctioned still? Harmony OS has a very small share in EU either way.

	▲	coderatlarge 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		consumers are harmed because Apple is forced to build in a way that expands its qa surface to include hypothetical tbd third-party integrations thus worsening their products, and surely opening up to more fines by the same EU who set them up like this in the first place. those who stand to benefit from unjust laws are rarely the ones who acknowledge their nature. in your previous response you seem to claim that samsung is an insignificant player in the smartphone market, and that integrating third-party app stores doesn’t require divulging security-related IP so i’m going to drop the mic right here.