But what motivation has the EU to promulgate these regulations?

* Chat control is toothless if users can simply side-load an app without snooping.

* The EU companies who successfully lobbied for regulations against Apple now see that the 15% tax is worth it when they can A/B test the counterfactual. So those companies no longer care if Google will do the same thing.

* The EU is now in an awkward position that it is ok for a newspaper to sell your personal info via pay-or-consent, but not for a social network to do it. Some will keep yammering on about "gatekeepers", but it's sort of an emperor has no clothes moment.

* Declaring that iPadOs is a gatekeeper (after it failed to meet the quantitative criteria for such) was another such emperor has not clothes moment. The whole "gatekeeper" narrative has turned into a farce.

* The people commenting on this forum are not even a rounding error in the EU electorate.

> It's not reasonable to expect consumers to figure out if the meat they buy is tainted, just as it's not to figure out if their phone spies on them, manipulates information, or sells their data (especially when there's a duopoly).

Indeed! Neither would it be reasonable for the sellers of meat to demand anonymity! If one sells tainted meat, he should be held accountable! We should identify him!

Yet, the creators and sellers of software for a General Purpose Computer (remember, that is the argument why phones should be regulated) demand that they should be above the law, anonymous and unaccountable!

Schrodinger's computing device: The one which is so vital to everyday life that we must not prohibit the user to run whatever software he likes, yet so unimportant that we have not a care in the world to identify any fraudster who might wish to distribute software.