I'd ask the inverse of the question: morally, should a single gatekeeper have the right to deny two consenting parties the ability for one to run the other's software?

Especially when that ability has been established practice and depended upon for decades? And the gate-kept device in question is many users' primary gateway to the modern world?

There's nuance here, of course - I'm not morally obliged to help you run Doom on your Tamagotchi just because you want to do so. But many people around the world rely on an Android device as their only personal computing device (and this is arguably more true for Android than it is for iOS). And to install myself as an arbiter of what code they can and cannot run, with full knowledge that I could at any time be required to leverage that capability at the behest of a government those worldwide users never agreed to be dependent on? That would be a morally fraught system for me to create.

The moral justification is that I am a citizen, and can demand the laws I want. When enough people think like me, we can actually make it a law. By holding the smartphone OS oligopoly these companies hold a lot of power on the people. I do not like that. Hence I like laws that try to change that.

> especially as engineers who make their living by creating intellectual property and probably wouldn’t want to see control of it seized randomly

If these people try to use their intellectual property to control my device and hence my ability to do things, I want to have a say what they do. Yes, that is what software is: directions to machines. I own the machine, hence I want a say what it does. You are free to keep your intellectual property for yourself, if you want to.

At some point free markets become fiction. There's no financially viable way to start competing businesses in markets as entrenched as mobile OSes. Otherwise this would have happened. And if that becomes anti consumers, then the consumers start changing the rules the companies operate under. Because in a democracy we have more consumers than CEOs,so they vote with majority.

(This obviously simplifies things, but ultimately we as humans still haven't found the one and only true philosophy or moral, and maybe that's not possible (I'm no philosopher))

There are no absolute morals. But I think in general healthy societies are arranged around the ideas that people should have: the basics of living (housing, food, vacation, and some luxory), agency, and equal opportunities.

It should be clear that having a small number of companies murder all competition and personal freedoms (like doing what you want to do with something you own like a phone) are in contrast to these basic values.

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Or the alternative, more blunt answer: it does not require a moral justification. EU citizens directly elected the EP, the EP ratified the DMA. So Google can either comply or leave the EU as a market (which they wont do because it's too large and others would be happy to take it).

They are 100% free to not sell to European customers

The moral argument is that vertically integrated monopolies threaten the rights of consumers, who are human beings. Corporations are legal fictions and their "rights" are another convenient fiction to align incentives. They carry zero moral weight.

> That is not their fault, though.

It is though. They are actively working on increasing their marketshare. That doesn't happen by accident. They have chosen to place the interests of the corporation over the interest of their fellow people. They are fine to do that, because we separated that responsibility. Corporations can only chase for profit, because we have governments, that make the rules, so that chasing profits is in the interests of the people.

Maybe you don't like that, and that is fine for you, although I don't like that you don't like that. Maybe you want a society where might makes right. However a lot of people don't feel that way, hence why we outsourced that world model to the government.

People don't like that their neighbor is stronger than them and takes there stuff, so they pay feudal lords. Then the feudal lords want some security, so they outsource that to elected emperors. After a while the feudal lords misuse their power, so parliaments are invented. Eventually people have enough and demand voting rights. The elected leaders betray the people by sending them to war, so they created multinational institutions, that try to prevent this (EU). They haven't used their power to betray the people enough, so we are still fine with them.

"Wealth comes with obligations" is literally in my country's constitution. You, may don't like that, but I do. I think a lot of other people do as well. It is of course always for discussion how much.

It kind of is their fault because of Google Play Integrity APIs. They are effectively developing tools that are designed to make their product mandatory. There wouldn't be a backlash that big if we could just unlock our bootloaders and run a patched version of Android.

> any [] property can be [taken by the state] from its [original] owners simply by [those owners becoming more powerful than the state wants]

When rephrased like the above, I think what you’re describing is pretty common in history. Many industries and assets have been nationalized when it serves the state’s interests.

IMO the moral justification is that there is no ownership or private property except that which is sanctioned by the state (or someone state-like) applying violence in its defense. In this framing, there’s little moral justification for the state letting private actors accrue outsized power that harms consumers/citizens.

> And you can use it.

Tell that to the locked bootloader.

> What you want is access to further intellectual property they develop (updates, features), that just so happens to be able to run on your hardware and ability to shepherd it in a direction you want and they don’t.

Well yeah, I am paying them with money (and data) and thereby with power and expect them in turn to provide directions for my device, so that is does what I want. That's kind of the deal. If they don't want to provide that, then they can just not accept my money (and data). They can of course produce devices, that to what they want, and want me to carry them around, but then they better pay me.

If they use the power I gave them against me, then I will demand my power projection as a service provider (aka. the government) to project power in my interest.

> that just so happens to be able to run on your hardware

the hardware is specifically locked down with "trusted computing" features to facilitate this. It's not a random coincidence. The problem here lies in the network effects and the use of trusted computing. If my bank app mandates that I use "real deal 100% certified android", then I can't just develop my own OS. So it's an antitrust situation.

If every company in the world teamed up with MegaCorp and made their services contingent on wearing a MegaCorp shock collar powered by trusted computing, would you wear it? You are free to not use the collar... and starve to death in the woods I suppose.

I don't usually even care about intellectual property. It's a hack to grant a temporarily exclusive monopoly as a way to incentivize R&D. The R&D in this case is just solving the question of "how do we establish a larger monopoly". So why should the public be forced to uphold it?

Asking me if I am willing to violate intellectual property in this situation is like if I was being lowered into a pit of liquid hot magma and in order to get out I had to break the flag code or jaywalk or something.