It’s kind of funny that the EU’s regulation here would force Apple to allow options that are worse for user privacy. Apple is the least incentivized to farm data from its users; in fact, that’s a huge selling point. They mentioned it over and over and over in the WWDC keynote today.

In my opinion, Apple is doing the right thing for users. It’s not like they have a huge revenue stream here. Yes, there will be some features or usage that require iCloud plus or whatever to cover incremental cost, but I genuinely believe that they don’t want services creeping in that break their trust with users or their privacy-first reputation.

Apple’s decision (users will have a less powerful product because we’re not vacuuming up their data and using it for profit) is exactly the kind of thing the EU should want. No country has appropriate data privacy guidelines for AI (yet) so opening up choice can’t provide alternatives.

(To be clear, I’d be fine with Anthropic here, but am fine with this state. Maybe because I’m so used to Siri sucking that I’ve given up hope.)

> Apple is doing the right thing for users.

The right thing for users would be to allow user choice, and for Apple to compete fairly.

Apple allowing third party access doesn't automatically mean user data gets hoovered up by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. It just means users now get the choice, if they want to make that choice. Users could stay with Siri/Apple if they care about what Apple is offering, or choose to accept the risks and terms of service with other third parties.

The EU isn't saying "you must preinstall every competitors offering" its "you must offer the ability for others to hook into the same APIs to be able to offer their own assistant on par with the first party option."

The user still remains in control by virtue of their own choice.

Apple ad revenue is ~10% of rev, with Google deal, and growing. New management is going to turn it less privacy focused company, because Apple needs to pursue growth.

if for a second you believe that what apple says the regulators told them is the same thing as what the regulators told them, i have a cow farm under the titanic to sell you

Your premise is incorrect; if apple truly wants to do the 'right thing for its users', it would allow choice. The fact that the current crop of likely alternate choices include quite a few companies and offerings that seem far more user hostile than apple's offering doesn't change that fact (it merely raises separate concerns that there need to be more laws such as the EU's DMA, not fewer).

However, even if your premise is correct, it does not matter.

In the end, trying to manage such products (require massive investment, have network effects, offer significant gatekeeping and rentseeking opportunities) is extremely problematic.

On one hand, the market cannot do it properly: There are tons of externalities, and, like e.g. building out rail, the absolutely gigantic barriers to entering the market means the existing players merge into a monopoly or oligopoly.

On the other, the product is too complex and too dependent on continuous evolution to officially turn it into a state-controlled / state-run monopoly (the solution many countries have deployed to solve e.g. how rail, or medical insurance, or road networks, end up in a terrible state if left up to the market).

So what is one to do?

The current crop of mostly US led large companies seem to have gone with a 'just trust me, bro!' argument, with some 'AI is so important you cannot put up any roadblocks at all!' sprinkled in.

And yet these companies time and again prove that they can't be trusted. Which is obvious and logical: Companies must conform to the law, but are otherwise amoral. Or rather, their 'moral' compass has nothing to do with human moral compasses: They must earn money for their shareholders, in whatever legal way they can find that is most efficient, paying as much attention to future company growth and health as its shareholders desire. That isn't just 'what they are incentivized to do' - that is what they are legally *required* to do.

And yet you've gone with a motif of 'but apple is the one company that is doing it right so lets just trust them.. bro'.

There *is* a solution:

Use the fact that the state has powers of persuasion that companies simply do not have. The threat of law, and the monopoly on violence.

Essentially, a state can simply tell a company: The populace have spoken and they value X (say, privacy). They value it a lot. You will deliver. At low cost. This is not a request, it is a demand. If you don't want to or can't, then we shall write laws to regulate you and then *everybody loses*.

Conceptually this works, in a weird game of chicken / madman theory: If the corporation in question believes that society will regulate them into oblivion unless they comply with society's demands even if this means society incurs a great cost, then the corporation *will comply*.

This has happened before. There is no actual law in the US that a movie gets a rating, and the movie industry pays for and manages the ratings of its movies entirely as an internal affair. And yet, in general, movie ratings are stellarly well run compared to what a government run institution would have done.

The reason *is* that threat. The movie industry decided to police itself because it was quite clear that if they did not, the government would have, at great cost to the movie making industry (and at significant cost to society as well, in the form primarily of much worse films).

For some reason that isn't entirely clear to me, CEOs of large corporations that deem themselves 'IT companies' do not understand this part. They will fight tooth and nail to fight every law, and especially in the US, perhaps due to extremely dire and long-term distrust by its populace in its own government, many of its citizens incorrectly side with its corporations on this idea, even though time and again corporations prove that they have no allegiance other than to the almighty dollar (which, to be clear, is not a complaint. That is how society has set them up. My only complaint is that e.g. you seem to have forgotten that this is how it works).

Hence, given that the system works on, in essence, fear / coercion, the only right answer is to do an attitude adjustment, find a massive club, and beat a whole bunch of IT companies into absolute pulp until the remaining CEOs understand.

And before you make a note about the brash, medieval nature of that comment - it is already clear that these CEOs who think they are God's Greatest Gift To This Planet, are already meekly running, tail between their legs, to kiss the pinky ring of a personalist wannabe emperor president. They are _clearly_ motivated by such fear and _clearly_ cannot be trusted to rise to the occasion and be a new form of benevolent leadership for the citizenry.

I wish they were. It'd be so much easier.