DMA is a not a privacy-oriented law.

> If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere.

Those are not equivalent statements. You're assuming that privacy is a one-dimensional quantity, so that anything that complies with "the strictest international privacy laws" automatically also complies with any other privacy laws. But this is not actually true. It can easily be the case that every national law allows some set of behavior (different sets for different legal systems), at the same time that the intersection of all those sets is empty.

DMA is about competition, not privacy. Apple weren’t requesting a GDPR waiver.

Nothing usually gets fixed by making belligerent appeals to emotion in the court of public opinion (which, in the EU, isn't nearly rooting for Apple as much as they might imagine, fwiw). If you want to launch something in a market you know to be heavily regulated, you figure it out or you don't launch. Sure, drop a hint here and there when asked in interviews about your product strategy, but you generally don't pick a public fight with the regulator or legislator in question.

Just imagine a European bank publishing a press release about how onerous the US credit card consumer protection laws are, or a Japanese car maker publicly whining about European car safety testing protocols delaying the market release of some of their models. Apple really is behaving in a very unusual way here.

And even though I don't like the implication of this (the law should not disadvantage anyone purely for being critical of it), I can't help but wonder how many fewer pages the DMA would be if Apple had engaged with its predecessors in good faith instead.

That’s fair. Apple bickers in the EU and U.S. It doesn’t in China. I have a clear preference for one set of political systems.

> complying with all kinds of laws delays release in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct?

DMA was designed to be a comprehensive regulatory suite. Lawmakers knew it would be onerous; that’s why it only applies to large companies.

Also, the DMA’s interoperability requirement creates external partners. Let’s face it, Apple’s track record with Siri sucks. If they launch a system and it is crap again, they may not now want an entire ecosystem of folks who will cry foul if they dump the API and start over.

> Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always

Just follow the law. If that means not releasing in a jurisdiction, do that and then don’t tweet snotty things about it. (Siri AI isn’t launching in China, either. I don’t see PMs complaining about that in public.)