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.

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"

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.

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?

I think comments on pretty much everything skew negative. There’s not much to say if you support the fine.

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).

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 :)

> 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.

It's almost like HN is a (semi-)large community with many different viewpoints!