[HN Gopher] Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe...
___________________________________________________________________
Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe's Digital
Markets Act
Author : mrkramer
Score : 463 points
Date : 2025-03-13 22:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I don't see this happening although I would have a beer belly
| laugh if all of these tech oligarchs got on their knees just for
| Trump to piss on their heads.
| yapyap wrote:
| That would be pretty sweet
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| Supposedly, he's not into watersports. Given his temperament,
| his attitude toward SiliValley CEOs could change in the next 5
| minutes, then go another direction 5 minutes later.
|
| We are not dealing with a stable individual here. The only
| predictable trait he has is vindictiveness.
| callc wrote:
| > The DMA designates six tech companies as "gatekeepers" to the
| internet -- Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and
| Microsoft -- and limits these technology kingpins from engaging
| in anticompetitive tactics on their platforms, in favor of
| interoperability.
|
| DMA seems like a no-brainer for those that support users'
| freedom. Since DMA came into effect almost two years ago, can
| anyone comment on its effectiveness?
|
| Side note, I'm glad the EU takes normal people's rights
| seriously. Wish the US was a leader on this too.
| nodoll wrote:
| I don't like they are designated as "gatekeepers".
| walterbell wrote:
| Do you ________ take this immortal corporation ________ to be
| your lawful internet Gatekeeper?
| nativeit wrote:
| I object to this foul, tainted union. The children will
| have crossed toes and webbed eyes. God expressly forbids
| this in Romans: "Yea, unto thee I say, no man shall lay
| with an algorithmically-endowed data sucking Beast With A
| Billion Bucks as they would with a woman...shit, or with a
| guy, it's 2025-evangelicals are off the rails, political
| leaders are depriving a suffering majority of life saving
| services while propping up a gilded minority, all manner of
| unsavory acts are being committed in My name, frankly I
| think it's well past time I gave Adam and Steve my official
| blessing. You do you, as long as it's all love, go with Me,
| God" (paraphrasing a bit at the end there)
|
| Anyway, what was this originally about? Armageddon?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Why? the designation comes with obligations, but Im not aware
| that it confers any benefits.
| margalabargala wrote:
| As far as I can tell, it's a descriptor used negatively, not
| a crowning designation.
| riffraff wrote:
| The key is to imagine them as Zuul the Gatekeeper from
| Ghostbusters.
| 14 wrote:
| I have honestly slowly over the years lost my love for the
| iPhone. Back in the early days they were exciting and you
| could jailbreak and do lots of fun things not typically
| possible on a non jailbroken phone. Some of those fun things
| eventually became features of the stock iPhones but in the
| end the phone is very locked down and can only do a very
| small portion of the things it actually could do if not so
| locked down.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> Some of those fun things eventually became features of
| the stock iPhones_
|
| iOS has since stagnated without the field laboratory of
| jailbreak innovations.
|
| When VMs return to iOS to compete with Android Linux VMs, a
| new innovation cycle can begin. Concepts proven within the
| freedom of Linux or macOS VMs can be reimplemented in stock
| iOS or native iOS apps, for integration with native
| workflows.
| arlort wrote:
| They are the ones who allow getting into a walled garden.
| Short of calling them "gates" gatekeeper seems pretty apt
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It's about as effective as the GDPR - which means very strong
| regulation and penalties on paper, but no actual enforcement of
| said penalties once you breach it - all bark and no bite.
|
| (please, don't reply with that "enforcement tracker" link - a
| billion is nothing for Facebook and especially not when it's in
| exchange of 7 years of continuous and blatant breach of the
| regulation)
| bad_user wrote:
| That the GDPR is "all bark and no bite" is factually untrue.
|
| As an example of a service that was forced to change to get
| in line with GDPR: Facebook.
|
| For user profiling, they first tried to use their Terms of
| Service, then they tried claiming a legitimate interest, then
| they tried offering paid subscriptions, and now they are at
| the point where they somewhat degrade the experience of those
| refusing to be profiled. I'm not talking about the fines, I'm
| talking about EU citizens being able to use Facebook while
| refusing to give their consent for profiling. I'm also
| talking about the ability to download your data or to delete
| your data from their servers, which was also the outcome of
| GDPR.
|
| Facebook has also received multiple GDPR-related fines, maybe
| it's not enough, but it's only going to get worse, as EU
| regulators are also eyeing them for the spread of election
| misinformation. Actually, Zuckerberg has been kissing Trump's
| ring because he's hoping for some protectionism from the US.
| He said so in his now infamous Joe Rogan podcast episode.
|
| And for the DMA -- well, Apple now allows alternative browser
| engines within the EU, as just one example.
|
| So I just don't understand why people make this claim. The
| DPAs may be slow, but that's not a good argument. Law
| enforcement in general is slow. And the fact is that the GDPR
| is changing the Internet, which is undeniable.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The GDPR is very clear (despite those who profit from
| breaching it would like you to believe): consent for non-
| essential data collection/processing should be strictly
| opt-in. You can't opt-in by default, you can't use dark
| patterns to trick people to opt-in, and you can't degrade
| the experience to coerce people to opt in.
|
| Yet by your own comment's admission, Facebook has tried
| multiple blatant breaches of the regulation, and is _still_
| in business and trying their latest iteration of pseudo-
| compliance, which means whatever enforcement there is, it
| 's clearly not enough.
|
| When it comes to the DMA, Apple is currently on track to
| receive a (very low) fine for not actually complying by
| still preventing developer from letting users know they can
| pay for apps/services outside the App Store for cheaper. So
| clearly the potential penalties and actual enforcement is
| low enough that Apple is (rightly) calling their bluff.
| bad_user wrote:
| I can now use Facebook without being profiled for ads. I
| can also delete my account.
|
| It took longer than expected, but it happened. The GDPR
| has forced Facebook and others to change.
|
| People may want huge fines, but then the EU is accused of
| targeting US companies or suffocating innovation. I don't
| want fines necessarily, I want results.
| fumufumu wrote:
| > Apple now allows alternative browser engines within the
| EU, as just one example.
|
| Have any shipped?
| Hamuko wrote:
| No but Google has reportedly been testing Blink on iOS.
| jchw wrote:
| Not in the EU myself but I don't think so. There's a
| specific entitlement that has to be granted and last time
| I looked nobody has ever done it.
|
| I learned one interesting tidbit from the latest Ladybird
| progress report: apparently, in order for an engine to
| actually be eligible to get this entitlement, it actually
| has to have a higher than 90% WPT pass rate. I think it
| is absolutely fascinating that this is part of the
| criteria. The differences between the era of more-or-less
| free distribution on desktop platforms couldn't be more
| different than the totalitarian control of iOS and the
| slightly less restrictive control of Android. It almost
| feels like what happened with home computers was an
| accident, a circumstance that was only temporary and that
| once it is finally taken away we'll never get it back.
|
| It's weird to think about. The evolving nature of
| computer security has definitely created some serious
| challenges for having a more open distribution model, but
| by and large nobody wants to try to solve that, and
| there's not much of an incentive to. The problem is,
| though, that closing down distribution doesn't just
| magically solve the problem of trust, it centralizes it
| to a single entity, with all of the many problems that
| comes with.
|
| People, of course, seem to defend this practice tooth and
| nail. Like, it's not enough to just have the option of
| curated walled gardens: it's important to be forced to
| use them, because your agency could be used against you
| by _other_ massive corporations, by coercing you to
| sidestep security measures. (Nevermind the fact that the
| existence of said abusive mega corporations is, in and of
| itself, a problem that should be dealt with directly...)
|
| Meanwhile, I'm just blown away. I have an iPad with an M1
| processor. It has virtualization capabilities. It could
| run VMs, if Apple would let it. Volunteers have gone
| great lengths despite JIT restrictions and sandboxing to
| make decent virtualization software for iOS, entirely
| free of charge. But instead, they updated iPadOS to
| explicitly _remove_ the hypervisor framework in a major
| OS upgrade, and of course, it being an iPad, you can 't
| even choose to downgrade it. Now I'm not saying running a
| desktop OS in a VM is an ideal experience for a tablet,
| but the damn thing has a keyboard cover and all manner of
| connectivity, it would be _extremely_ useful to allow
| this, especially given how relatively powerful the device
| is. Yet, you can 't.
|
| And sure. If you don't like it, don't buy it. I largely
| don't buy Apple products anymore, but I have a few for
| various reasons. They're very nice pieces of hardware.
| But the thing is, the market isn't incentivized to offer
| alternatives to Apple. What Apple has accomplished with
| the App Store is absolutely unparalleled: 30% of all
| revenue. Everywhere, in every app. Perpetually.
| _Forever_. Holy Shit. And sure, there are technically
| exceptions, but let 's face it: they play fast and loose
| with their own rules. When even Patreon is forced to pay
| 30% you _know_ they are just going to push anyone with
| enough revenue into it with some rationale. So I
| personally struggle to believe that there will be
| alternatives if nothing is done. It 's not a matter of
| people not being willing to buy viable alternatives, it's
| more a matter of nobody being able to sell them, because
| doing the arguably unfair thing profits hand-over-fist
| and nobody can fucking compete with that.
|
| So we're here, bargaining with the richest company in the
| world, for the ability to be able to download a web
| browser that isn't Safari in a trenchcoat.
|
| I don't like all EU regulation, but it's kind of unreal
| to watch this unfold and see how people actually defend
| this status quo. I still struggle to reconcile how people
| who consider themselves hackers or at least adjacent to
| hacker culture can see all of this and not feel dead
| inside.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > It almost feels like what happened with home computers
| was an accident, a circumstance that was only temporary
| and that once it is finally taken away we'll never get it
| back.
|
| Home computers gave full control to the owners because
| there was no other choice. There was no internet, no way
| to push updates or hoover up data. Anything that happened
| on those machines had to be initiated by the user. They
| have been working on pulling all that back ever since
| always-on internet has become something that can
| basically be taken for granted.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| And thankfully a lot of people realize that's utter
| bullshit and are taking measures to fight off further
| enshittification. I'm not a nationalist but things like
| the GDPR and DMA make me proud to be European.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > I'm also talking about the ability to download your data
| or to delete your data from their servers, which was also
| the outcome of GDPR.
|
| I'll admit that I did this years ago so it may be different
| now. Facebook just gave me a copy of the data that I
| explicitly uploaded to Facebook: text posts and images.
| There was no other data about my login history or request
| history or anything else that (I believe, perhaps
| mistakenly) the GDPR considers as my personal data (cross-
| site tracking is the big one). There's also no way to
| verify that my deletion request was honored, even for those
| text posts and images, but that will probably never be
| false so that's kind of a weak point, IMO.
|
| Not that I disagree with your overall point, just wanted to
| offer some words of concern on this particular point.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| I have no data on enforcement but since it went into effect,
| every place I've worked has taken it very seriously so it has
| definitely had consequences, very positive ones in my
| opinion.
| matsemann wrote:
| Same. Used to work for a government agency, and our test
| data was just replicas of the prod database. Little access
| control, and PII was floating everywhere. It got really
| tightened up to be ready for GDPR.
|
| And then every company since have also been very stringent
| and conscious about privacy. It's just part of being a good
| engineer in Europe. The same way you think of how a feature
| will be performant or maintainable or secure, you also
| automatically think about privacy implications and raise
| any issues.
| anvuong wrote:
| What do you mean not effective? I worked in a digital
| marketing/advertising company and we needed to re-architect
| our whole system to comply with GDPR, it was a pain in the
| ass for both backend team and analytics team.
| campl3r wrote:
| GDPR has allowed me access to my data from multiple
| companies, where before I would have had no way or a long and
| expensive way of getting my data. More than a dozen other
| countries have implemented some versions of it.
|
| Could enforcement be better? Sure Could some of the rules be
| better? Sure Is it being updated to be better? Yes, it has
| happened and will continue to happen.
|
| To read on the current state I recommend
| https://commission.europa.eu/publications/reports-
| applicatio...
| Tomte wrote:
| As a direct consequence I have two alternative app stores on my
| iPhone. Something Americans cannot have.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| or Australians :(
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| What are the worthwhile apps apps on the alternative stores?
| njintje wrote:
| Fortnite, Fall Guys, Delta (Emulator for Nintendo DS,
| Gameboy, N64, NES and much more).
|
| Torrent clients. QEMU. YouTube Apps with Sponsorblock and
| Adblock.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > QEMU
|
| Isn't it still crippled and unusable for any non ancient
| platform unless you have a jailbreak?
|
| Seems like you still need to side load AltStore Classic
| to get the full version.
| terinjokes wrote:
| You need to be tethered to enable the JIT, without it UTM
| is very slow. Even TinyCoreLinux was extremely slow.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Yeah, so the EU App Store don't really solve that since
| there is still not way(?) to get JIT legitimately.
| SSLy wrote:
| that's problem with APPL's attitude, not the "EU App
| Store".
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The problem has always been Apple's attitude, which the
| DMA sort to fix.
|
| Whether Apple is in compliance or not is up for debate.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| It's a problem with EU's regulations if they allow such
| outcome (i.e. Apple being allowed to artificially cripple
| third party apps).
|
| Obviously AltStore did the best they could..
|
| > APPL's attitude
|
| Everybody knew from the beginning that they'll do the
| minimum they can get away with so blaming Apple is
| somewhat pointless.
| larfus wrote:
| I'm genuinely flabbergasted by this thread.
|
| > ... Everybody knew that Apple would be uncongenial,
| borderline malicious ...
|
| > Therefore its pointless to blame Apple
|
| The entire fault is on Apple. The EU that is notoriously
| depicted as overly bureaucratic and slow-moving managed
| to make the largest consumer walled garden to relax its
| gates and give _some_ form of authority to people who
| _own_ the damn device.
|
| Remember, _no_ form of official sideloading existed
| before the DMA.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _Remember, no form of official sideloading existed
| before the DMA._
|
| MDM has long existed. In fact that was Apple's
| counterpoint to alternative alt-stores.
|
| Certainly it didn't allow you to bypass any execution
| restrictions any further than the regular app store.
|
| Random link: https://it-
| training.apple.com/tutorials/support/sup530/
| larfus wrote:
| I'm taking consumer focused solutions into account. No
| single individual could reasonably set up MDM to gain
| some sort of freedom
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| Delta is on the official iOS App Store for what it's
| worth. There are also a couple apps that support watching
| YouTube with sponsorblock and Adblock available too.
| larfus wrote:
| Delta seems to be allowed (at least partially) because of
| the DMA and the EU.
|
| I'd also love to hear your suggestions on those couple of
| apps. Last time i checked, proper apps either charge
| whatever they want to because of their monopolistic
| position(+ the cost of an Apple Developer Program to a
| hobbyist) , and free apps unclear if they even solve the
| problem are designed to harvest and sell almost
| everything you have.
|
| Orion is a very rare exception in both of these cases but
| they weren't able to make uBO work
| DownrightNifty wrote:
| > Delta seems to be allowed (at least partially) because
| of the DMA and the EU.
|
| Yeah, that's an important point. Delta on the App Store
| is most likely a direct result of the Digital Markets
| Act: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/5/24122341/apple-
| app-store-g...
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Delta is in the ordinary App Store, too.
| larfus wrote:
| That is because Apple relaxed its App Store guidelines
| after the DMA to disincentive sideloading.
| SSLy wrote:
| https://hottubapp.io/ too
| jen20 wrote:
| Americans absolutely can, if they live in the EU where this
| law applies.
|
| Europeans living in the US (such as myself) cannot.
|
| I'm not commenting on whether this is good or not, merely
| that the last statement in your comment is incorrect.
| gunian wrote:
| just other corporations trynna make money no one ever does
| anything to be good but to make money :)
| yupyupyups wrote:
| Apple still indirectly controls what is distributed and charges
| developers outside their app store money[1]. So it hasn't been
| effective enough to actually open up the platform for arbitrary
| apps to be installed.
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
| niemandhier wrote:
| That is under investigation, and believed to be non compliant
| with the act:
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_.
| ..
| whazor wrote:
| I now have a torrent client on my iPhone.
| Cupprum wrote:
| I might be wrong, but are you talking about the qBitControl
| from Altstore Pal?
|
| If so, that is not a torrent client, but only an app to
| control torrents on a different computer. Or did i not
| understand the app correctly?
| erlend_sh wrote:
| https://www.techpolicy.press/assessing-europes-digital-marke...
| oersted wrote:
| Good. They keep making laws intended to control some of the
| negative impacts of these companies, but they usually have the
| resources to mostly get around these laws, and they end-up
| affecting smaller companies in ways that the government didn't
| intend or consider.
| fundatus wrote:
| Apple has been really against this one, but you can now have
| p*rn apps on your iPhone in the EU. Which I think is great,
| because why should I be restricted in the use of my own device
| by the moral code of an American corporation?
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _why should I be restricted in the use of my own device by
| the moral code of an American corporation?_
|
| I would argue that, while it's true that some of your rights
| are restricted by corporations, others are just there waiting
| for you to exercise them.
|
| Use your freedom, take chances, write the word "porn" in HN
| without fear. Otherwise there's no point in demanding
| freedoms that we're too afraid to use.
| fundatus wrote:
| Good point, I wasn't sure if writing "porn" would be
| flagged by some kind of badwords filter, so I didn't
| bother, but apparently it's no problem over here :-)
| pjc50 wrote:
| No badwords filter here, just good old fashioned
| handcrafted moderation by dang and artisinal flagging by
| individual users. You don't have to resort to weird
| euphemisms like "unalive".
| camillomiller wrote:
| I can indirectly say that, as someone that understands the
| opposition to sideloading, we are one year in since the DMA
| took effect and I've seen no incredible massive threat has
| imperiled the digital lives of iPhone users like Apple claimed
| it would. Apple would probably say that's because of the
| measures they've take in implementing the sideloading mandate,
| but I would rather assume that there are generally less risks
| that they say there are. Macs are pretty popular with a lot of
| non-tech-savvy people nowadays, and despite being able to
| install all you want, there is absolutely no major incredible
| threat coming from it. I believe it's time for Apple to stop
| the madness and re-unify iOS globally under a system that works
| more like macOS.
| filleokus wrote:
| My "fear" has always been that Meta/Alphabet would slowly but
| surely migrate their apps over to their own third-party App
| Store to get past the pesky IDFA limitations[0] and other
| tracking hurdles.
|
| So far nothing seems to indicate that it's happening. The
| question is if it's due to Apple's "measures" or just because
| it is not worthwhile for Meta/Alphabet. I think it's a
| combination of. But if it was as easy to "side-load" an app
| on iOS as on macOS - per your suggestion, I'm confident Meta
| would have done the switch in a heartbeat.
|
| Just imagine if Apple provided nice API's for auto-updating,
| essentially no limitations on what binaries can be attested,
| API's/mechanisms for easy migration between AppStore apps and
| side loaded ones, no scary screens etc. Essentially
| implementing the DMA to the fullest extent, really honouring
| the intent of the law. Why wouldn't all the mega apps just
| move over? And what consequences would it have?
|
| I think it would be awesome to e.g lift the JIT blocking and
| allow more strange niche things in alternative app stores.
| But getting all regular people on a wild-west third party app
| stores for the (ad financed) apps the use every day is just
| begging for a huge _actual_ loss in privacy.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers
| #App...
| noirscape wrote:
| I think it's just not worth it for them; look at Android,
| where sideloading was always available as an option.
|
| Facebook _does_ offer separate APKs on their website (so
| do, in fact, most major services - Netflix and Spotify also
| offer APKs from their website), but practically the only
| reason people end up using them is if they 're on a device
| that doesn't support the Play Store (for whatever reason).
|
| The only serious Play Store competitors on Android are
| either vendor specific (like Amazon's store) or wouldn't
| host Facebook apps to begin with and are unambiguously a
| positive force for users due to their standards (F-Droid,
| whose policies are designed to protect users from the
| typical mobile app rugpull of filling it with ads down the
| line). Anything outside of this tends to be independent
| hobby projects or corporate business apps.
|
| The inertia of being the default is still really strong
| (for a slight alternative, much of Google's strength comes
| from the fact they paid millions to browsers to be the
| default search engine for them, a practice that's been
| found to have violated antitrust laws - it's telling that
| Google really wanted to keep doing this), which is still
| enough to keep Facebook attached to the Play Store and is
| probably why they won't try to leave the App Store either.
| DownrightNifty wrote:
| > Since DMA came into effect almost two years ago, can anyone
| comment on its effectiveness?
|
| I'm so glad you asked, because I wrote an entire website about
| it: https://doesioshavesideloadingyet.com/
|
| Executive summary: Epic Games benefits greatly from the DMA,
| but powerusers and smaller developers don't get much benefit.
| This is due to Apple's lackluster compliance measures that are
| currently being investigated and may be deemed illegal.
|
| We might hear another update from the EU rather soon though:
| https://9to5mac.com/2025/03/10/report-apple-will-be-fined-by...
|
| I really hope that the DMA does not go down in history as a
| failed experiment, because that will be a huge loss for open
| platforms as a whole.
| ks2048 wrote:
| iOS has sideloading, if you pay $100/year for a developer
| account.
| DownrightNifty wrote:
| That is listed under "unofficial sideloading methods". A
| more accurate title would've been "Does iOS _support_
| sideloading yet? " but I wanted to keep the domain name as
| short as possible :)
|
| The Apple Developer program is not intended as an option
| for end users to enable sideloading on their device, even
| if that is a side effect of joining it. It is only intended
| to allow developers to briefly test new builds of their own
| apps in a limited capacity before uploading them to the App
| Store (or third party stores in the EU). Apps "installed"
| this way expire after a certain length of time and you must
| ask Apple's cloud service for a new certificate each time
| that happens in order to keep using them. You're still tied
| to Apple indefinitely this way. If your developer account
| is terminated for whatever reason, or Apple decides to
| increase the price such that you can no longer afford your
| account, then suddenly you no longer have sideloading, and
| you no longer have access to any of the apps you previously
| sideloaded.
|
| Therefore, I lump it into the same category as jailbreaking
| -- yes, you can argue that the existence of that means iOS
| already has sideloading, but it's not officially supported.
|
| Sidenote: You don't need to spend $100/yr if you want to go
| the "unofficial sideloading" route; AltStore (Classic) is
| available for free: https://altstore.io/
| coastalpuma wrote:
| This is a great site, and thank you for the effort.
|
| One suggestion for an addition to the section on FOSS:
| Related to the issue of not being able to modify the source
| of apps we use, we also can't verify that an "open source"
| app on iOS is built from its claimed source code. We just
| have to trust the developer. This blocks true auditing of iOS
| apps for data privacy practices, something we know is needed
| given that the "privacy labels" are often deceptive
| https://archive.ph/Ak6qU. As such, this is a data security
| issue as much as a user freedom issue.
| DownrightNifty wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion. Feel free to contribute this
| change yourself if you want:
| https://github.com/DownrightNifty/dihsy/blob/main/dihsy.md
|
| I'll probably end up adding it myself if you don't want to,
| because it's actually something I wanted to include
| originally but forgot to.
|
| This is definitely a huge issue with the current
| implementation of DMA compliance. Apple's mandatory DRM
| encryption scheme as part of the notarization process
| doesn't just block reproducible builds and the improved
| security that those offer, but also means that third party
| app stores aren't capable of auditing the apps they offer
| in any way. If Apple lets something slip through their
| notarization review (which is not an impossibility, since
| it's happened on the App Store before), then the third
| party store carrying that app will be unfairly blamed for
| the incident.
| thrance wrote:
| Current US leadership only works for the few guys at the very
| top.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "Wish the US was a leader on this too."
|
| lmao you notice something was up right??? because most of this
| company are US based companies
|
| you are crazy to think US would do the same because it is would
| hampering their economy directly, EU doing this because they
| want EU counterpart gain benefit
| econ wrote:
| What worries me is the way big tech is forced to build some kind
| of law book (they call their TOS) some kind of detective
| apparatus, some kind of kangaroo court and a model for punishing
| the citizen (user) which is not something anyone should want them
| to do including them. It is like the old time court where every
| decision is made though the lens of profit. It gets even more
| dystopian in a closed ecosystem.
| mcny wrote:
| This is really our (US) fault. Terms of service is not the law.
| It should never be the law. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is
| a terrible piece of legislation that is completely out of touch
| with reality. It should have been abolished a long time ago and
| yet we have taken no steps to abolish it here in the US.
|
| This is all our (US) doing. We blazed the trail like this and
| have done nothing to correct our mistakes.
| ProAm wrote:
| Y Combinator "Urges the Whitehouse" is nothing but a fiduciary
| tight rope walking bribe to receive governance in your favor.
| personomas wrote:
| Yeah, I'm sure Y Combinator is not biased hahahaha (sarcasm of
| course)
| thrance wrote:
| Can't blame them, bribery is the only way to get heard by this
| administration.
| willmadden wrote:
| 1) that will never happen. 2) that should never happen.
| nbzso wrote:
| We all are trapped by TOS into data mining operation. There is no
| denying this fact. You don't own your computer or smartphone. You
| don't own your data. Practically speaking, we don't have an
| accessible and user-friendly tool to protect ourselves.
|
| The humanity collective data output is weaponized, and the
| surveillance state is transforming itself to an AI governance.
|
| Publicly announced by the WEF. And embraced by the masses, which
| have nothing to hide.
|
| Moreover, this thing is labeled as inevitable progress and the
| only option is transhumanism and post human ethos.
|
| Add to this incoming digital dollar/euro plus social scoring
| systems, and we are cooked.
|
| So, welcome China apparatus. :)
| gunian wrote:
| lmao you had me until china you probably believed ministry of
| information saying free world :)
| nbzso wrote:
| Question: Do you believe that Google and Palantir will not
| develop tech and work for Chinese Government(market)? Or
| Apple? Or Oracle?
| blitzar wrote:
| Remember lesson #1 - China doesn't innovate they copy us from
| 10-20 years ago.
|
| Lesson #2 - China spys on all its citizens.
| sofixa wrote:
| > China doesn't innovate they copy us from 10-20 years ago
|
| Like DeepSeek or BYD, right?
| gunian wrote:
| wish PKD was still alive to write about today man 1984 and
| mannin the high castle look like jokes lmao
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| YC can't even urge it's own startups to do anything
| darthrupert wrote:
| The current admin is not going to support anything sane or
| european. But nice sentiment.
| blitzar wrote:
| This forum is not going to support anything sane or european.
| But nice sentiment.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I personally don't care about alternative app stores, but I know
| many do, especially here.
|
| I really want two things:
|
| * companies cannot engage in any activity a common person would
| consider "spying", cannot take the data collected by users of
| that service and transfer it to another entity, and third parties
| may not aggregate data collected about persons for any reason.
| There are a million and one useful reasons to do each of these
| things, but companies have proven themselves morally bankrupt and
| should lose that ability. This would go beyond "opt-in", just
| make it illegal or the impractical (e.g. it would require a
| notary, licensed broker, or lawyers on both sides to engage in
| the practice)
|
| * digital "purchases" are transferrable and have all of the
| rights and privileges afforded to physical goods. The
| producer/consumer balance shifted completely in favor of the
| producer with digital goods. Terms need to be more favorable to
| the purchaser as well as protections following the dissolution of
| a digital marketplace.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I'd go further and apply something like the notary/broker
| approach to the _collection_ of data. Types of data should be
| defined in law. Some (say, email address) would be "free" to
| collect, but subject to strict sharing requirements like you
| describe (e.g., you can ask anyone for their email address, but
| you can't do anything with it except use it yourself to contact
| them). Others (mailing address) would be allowed for certain
| purposes (e.g., you need to mail the person a package).
| Companies should expect regular audits and stiff financial
| penalties if they collect such data but cannot objectively
| demonstrate that they actually need it to perform a service
| they are providing to the person who provides it. (This means
| you can't collect someone's mailing address unless you actually
| need it to do a specific thing _for that person_ ; simply using
| it as input to your internal analytics isn't good enough.)
| Others (e.g., location tracking) would require an approval
| process akin to being licensed to transport hazardous waste or
| something, so that it would be straight-up illegal to collect
| such data without prior approval. That approval process would
| involve full public disclosure of all intended uses of the
| data. You can't collect sensitive data without telling everyone
| exactly what you're going to do with it.
|
| A large portion of the data that is illegally shared should
| never have been collected in the first place.
| lodovic wrote:
| Some of this is already achieved by the EU's GDPR, not the
| DMA
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| I was about to say - GDPR has been pretty effective at
| warding off any kind of such non-sense here in the EU.
| Having been on the other end, it makes entire teams not
| indulge in certain methods. I never had to argue with
| marketing department why we want our users not be bombarded
| with spam.
|
| What I would like to see regulated are all those dark-
| pattern surveillance techniques that are slapped on
| absolutely everything these days. I'm just looking at a
| toaster, I don't want the toaster company looking back at
| me just because I looked at a fucking toaster once. Makes
| me weary of looking at stuff. This wasn't even that freaky
| pre-AI, but now it's a whole other ballgame. Stasi would
| love this stuff.
| exac wrote:
| To play devil's advocate, the common person accepts credit
| scores, and has no idea how they work. Should credit bureaus
| also be illegal? Or some medium whereby the credit companies
| _can_ collect the information, but can't sell it, or share
| analytics or even anonymized data?
| MegaButts wrote:
| > Should credit bureaus also be illegal?
|
| I didn't realize there were many people defending credit
| scores. I mean yeah, I would just assume they should be
| illegal. At least in their current opaque form where it's
| impossible to contest or even get someone to explain your
| score to you.
| bloppe wrote:
| Without credit scores, it would be impossible to get loans
| or a mortgage. I think a lot of people would be pretty
| bummed about that.
| MegaButts wrote:
| You could have credit scores that are designed to help
| people instead of the current mess where nobody can even
| tell you how it's calculated. The concept of a credit
| score is very different from what we have implemented in
| the United States. There's effectively zero transparency
| into how it works.
| bloppe wrote:
| That's fair. I just think saying "credit reporting should
| be illegal" is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
| plufz wrote:
| Which countries use credit scores? I didn't know it was a
| widespread thing, I always thought it was an American
| deviation.
|
| Here in Sweden we don't have it. When you apply for a new
| loan the bank can request information of other debts you
| have. And you have to send info about your income and
| answer questions about your expenses (living costs,
| number of children living at home, etc).
| zyberzero wrote:
| We do have credit scoring, but I don't think it is in the
| same sense as in the US though. If you look at "your" UC
| (for example using the app Kreddy) you will get a credit
| score back.
| briandear wrote:
| Doesn't that create a de facto credit score?
| bee_rider wrote:
| The scores were only invented in the 80's.
|
| But anyway, I wonder what the housing market would do if
| mortgages weren't possible to get. I bet the prices would
| go down.
| bloppe wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_bureau#History
|
| "Following the Panic of 1837, the first commercial credit
| reporting organizations formed."
|
| It only took a financial crisis and 3-year-long
| depression for people to realize that credit is
| important.
| pmontra wrote:
| It is possible that prices would go down but that will be
| an incentive to rent instead of selling. So less houses
| on the market. That could keep the prices up. And no
| matter how low the price is, if people have no savings
| and no credit even one year worth of salary would be too
| much of a price.
|
| The combination of all those factors could lead to a
| final state of a lot of houses owned by companies and a
| few extremely wealth people. Everybody else would be
| paying a rent.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Well, I come from a country without credit scores and I
| was able to get loans there. It was much easier than
| getting a loan in the US. Credit scores are a pretty bad
| system, all things considered.
| bloppe wrote:
| I'd love to learn more about this loan system. Do you
| mind if I ask which country that is?
| afloatboat wrote:
| I got a loan for a house 2 years ago. The process
| included showing our 3 last pay slips, the expected cost
| of the house (new build) and showing the bank how much
| money we had in our accounts (I loaned at a different
| bank that gave me better rates). There was a base
| percentage that lowered based on your level of income and
| the ratio of own contribution/loaned amount.
|
| I live in a Central European country.
| jisnsm wrote:
| So, credit score with extra steps, and no rewards (lower
| interests) for people who could prove that they are
| solvent and responsible with money.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Well interest rates are lower in Europe than the US.
|
| The other advantage over credit scores is that people
| willingly give their information out and are able to
| understand the banks decision.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _and no rewards (lower interests) for people who could
| prove that they are solvent and responsible with money._
|
| That's really what's driving support for credit scores,
| isn't it? That they provide some some people the
| (perception of an) ability to prove their character,
| their moral superiority, and to feel rewarded for all
| their hard sacrifices.
|
| Similar, I believe, to credit cards and all those rewards
| and air miles shenanigans - everyone feels _they 're_
| gonna be winners, so they support a private tax on
| everyone.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Those seem totally distinct?
|
| For example, credit card points are a zero sum game.
| Credit scores are not. Everyone _could be_ creditworthy,
| but many are not, and it's highly beneficial to the
| entire system to be able to identify which group a person
| fits into (including for the person who isn't
| creditworthy!)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Maybe?
|
| My mind isn't made on credit scores, though I do feel it
| might be a case similar to insurance - it's not strictly
| a zero-sum game, but it's also socially harmful to have
| such a system be 100% efficient. I.e. with insurance, if
| everyone was correctly pooled into small bucket that
| near-perfectly reflects their actual risk profile,
| insurance would stop making sense - those who need it
| most wouldn't be able to afford it, and those who could
| afford it need it the least _and_ would be better off
| putting that money into savings accounts.
|
| There's a lot of areas in the economy where increasing
| efficiency past some point just makes systems inhumane
| and exacerbates social problems.
|
| I feel default risk estimation may just be like that -
| the more reliable you want your credit score, the more
| invasive you need to be wrt. what information you collect
| and how you do it; meanwhile, the system becomes less and
| less tolerant of mistakes and unfortunate circumstances,
| while also exerting more control over how people live
| their lives.
|
| Already the US credit score makes people obsessed about
| credit, and getting credit cards and loans to
| improve/game their credit scores with their future
| mortgage in mind. That very much affects people's life
| choices at scale. I don't think having everyone leading
| their lives to optimize their credit score is a way to
| have a healthy society; conversely, maybe letting the
| lenders eat a little more risk, and the wealthiest (and
| most responsible with money, and most morally superior)
| have a little smaller line, actually improves overall
| well-being.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I agree with your concerns but don't feel like we're at
| that tipping point to be honest, relative to the value of
| credit being generally easy to get for the legitimately
| creditworthy.
|
| > Already the US credit score makes people obsessed about
| credit, and getting credit cards and loans to
| improve/game their credit scores with their future
| mortgage in mind
|
| I've encountered very, very few people doing this to an
| inappropriate degree (obviously yes you should
| consistently demonstrate creditworthiness, that's not
| gaming though). Anecdotally, the people I see doing this
| are actually seriously _not_ creditworthy. A whole lot of
| "you bought 3 cars and fucked your score, here's how to
| dig your way out." But like... the evidence actually
| shows you can't be trusted with credit!
|
| I don't disagree with any of your big picture concerns
| about the system and the possible edge cases or
| distortions of priorities. I just haven't seen evidence
| those are huge problems relative to the value of the
| system.
| davidcbc wrote:
| Having bought a house a couple times and having a 800+
| credit score each time it doesn't sound like extra steps
| at all. I also had to provide all that information and
| _more_ to get a mortgage
| jve wrote:
| Eastern Europe: I must consent and they do check whether
| there are any other loans and how good I have paid them.
| So they do evaluate credit rating at least here.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| In Germany you just get a mortgage amount calculated as
| your yearly income multiplied by some factor (iirc
| depending on the city)
|
| In Spain they look at your last few months of bank
| movements and calculate how much to loan you (usually
| something like max a third of your income can go to
| mortgage payments)
| alphager wrote:
| We have credit scoring in Germany (with the biggest
| scoring agency being Schufa).
| dsnr wrote:
| In Germany people are asked to provide their Schufa score
| at their own expense when looking for an apartment to
| rent.
| speleding wrote:
| A loan for a house typically isn't really "credit",
| because the value of the house covers the loan. The small
| print in your mortgage will say that if you default the
| bank will get the house.
|
| There is some risk to the bank because the house may have
| declined in value and it may be tricky to sell it when
| you default. That's why they do a risk assessment, but it
| can be a lot less invasive than for providing a personal
| loan for an education.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _a personal loan for an education_
|
| Which is another thing _we don 't do over here in the
| EU_.
|
| Perhaps what's left doesn't necessitate a full-blown
| credit score system?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Large banks were unwilling to loan $20k to me for a used
| car, even though I had $60k in cash in the bank and a
| $70k a year job I had for over 5 years, and no history of
| debt, because Transunion said I had no credit history.
|
| So instead a local credit union got a free $1500 for
| servicing that loan. A loan that I explicitly only took
| to "build credit" ie, pay a bank profit so they would
| vouch for me, which is what a credit score is designed to
| show, how much profit you give to banks and credit card
| companies for financing.
|
| They don't want to loan out money that might be _less
| profitable_ than a loan to someone who has paid a
| thousand credit card payments.
|
| The credit union then proceeded to _Not report my loan to
| the credit agencies!_ meaning I still have no credit.
| Awesome.
| lrem wrote:
| Switzerland - a public service collects a number of
| Boolean flags in the vein of "has ever refinanced a
| loan", serves the raw set to the person or institutions
| that can request it according to the regulations.
|
| Any EU country - regulations tend to be strict and vary
| from country to country. There is usually a central
| registry with either history of violated agreements
| and/or currently active loans. In pre-approval for a loan
| the borrower typically self-declares their credit
| capacity and the lender checks the registry for red
| flags. Before concluding the approval the lender will
| require supporting documentation (typically salary
| certificate, bank statement and/or tax returns).
| delusional wrote:
| I'm from denmark, and happen to work at one of the larger
| regional banks here. We similarly don't have "credit
| scores" in the American sense. We have scores that are
| calculated internally at our institution, but they're
| based on whatever we deem to fit our "risk appetite" we
| do not make use of any external centralized/opaque 3rd
| party rating agencies. We also have one of the highest
| household debt rates of any 1st world country, so getting
| a loan still seems possible.
|
| We do have a centralized registry of "bad debtors" and
| that has a highly negative effect on your ability to get
| a loan.
| Nursie wrote:
| Australia doesn't have credit scores.
|
| There are still credit bureaus, and things like defaults,
| judgements, etc are recorded, and when you apply for
| credit this is checked.
|
| However there are crucial differences to a score system
| like the UK and (I assume) the US - there is no 'building
| good credit', you don't get any benefit from having
| existing credit products and using them well. In fact the
| opposite - having other forms of credit like a credit
| card available is seen as a negative when you apply for a
| mortgage and will impact the amount you can get loaned.
| They'll literally knock the credit card limit off the top
| of the mortgage offer.
| buildfocus wrote:
| Spain - the bank asks for evidence of income (payslips or
| tax returns), existing funds (bank/broker statements) and
| checks outstanding debts (via a public register:
| https://www.bde.es/wbe/en/para-
| ciudadano/gestiones/informaci...). Risk analysis runs on
| that data directly. There's no credit history where you
| need to have ever borrowed money before.
|
| Average interest rate on mortgages in Spain with this
| system appears to be _half_ that of the US, so it seems
| this isn't so ineffective that premiums have to spike to
| match. (is that right?
| https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-rates/
| suggests 6% interest mortgages is a current average in
| the USA while Spain is below 3% now - personal anecdotes
| plus gov stats shows 3.25% average on all issued
| mortgages in 2024: https://ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operac
| ion.htm?c=Estadistica_...)
| briandear wrote:
| They are creating a credit score for you. They're asking
| for the essentially the same data a credit scoring agency
| would use. The difference is that they manually
| underwrite everything.
|
| Spain also enforces a much stricter debt to income ratio,
| which means it's much harder to get loans for people that
| already have debt, which means the risk profile is
| reduced for those that do get approved.
|
| Also Spain's unemployment is among the highest in the EU
| -- and almost three times higher than the U.S., so the
| central bank's lower interest rates reflect less of a
| concern over inflation and more of a concern towards
| encouraging growth. The low interest rates in Spain
| aren't a reflection of reduced risk but of lower central
| bank rates. You could get 30 year mortgages in the U.S.
| just a few years ago approaching 2%.
|
| Comparing mortgage rates across countries is a pointless
| endeavor because the macroeconomic circumstances are
| vastly different. For example, one would think that lower
| interest rates would result in a increase of housing
| supply in Spain as investors build more housing because
| the loans would be cheaper -- however that isn't the case
| because of the post-tax return on investment (and
| regulatory risk) for real estate is far worse than an
| equivalent investment in the United States despite higher
| lending costs. A EUR10 million housing project in Spain
| has a lower ROI than the same project would in North
| Carolina. Interest rates could be zero in Spain and it
| wouldn't change the housing market much because of the
| myriad of other factors that go into the spreadsheet.
| oblio wrote:
| I'd rather each bank do the due diligence themselves than
| some centralized entity removed from anything.
|
| Also almost all the things GP listed apply all across
| Europe. So the "Spain character assassination" exercise
| is pointless.
| nradov wrote:
| Well you're in luck because almost all US residential
| mortgage lenders perform that due diligence. Credit
| scores may be a factor in determining loan approval and
| interest rate but they also look at other metrics
| including DTI, LTV, and others.
| oblio wrote:
| Then what's the point of centralized scoring agencies
| except for selling your data?
| nradov wrote:
| Those aren't really "scoring agencies". The credit
| reporting agencies make most of their money with mortgage
| lenders by selling high-quality data. Credit scores are
| more of an add-on, and mainly of interest to other types
| of lenders dealing with smaller loans who can't afford to
| do rigorous underwriting themselves.
| immibis wrote:
| In the credit score system, you get no visibility into
| the data that is used for your decision. I think in GDPR
| there's actually a right that any algorithmic decision
| has to be able to be appealed to a real human. With
| credit scores, all you'd get is "your magic number is
| below our magic threshold"
| gpderetta wrote:
| "Magic 8 Ball says no"
| schnable wrote:
| US mortgage rates are typically 30-year fixed. In Europe
| aren't they typically variable rate and shorter times?
| Both impact the rate significantly.
| scarab92 wrote:
| Credit scores are a good system actually.
|
| They significantly improve the ability of a lender to
| model the default risk associated with a borrower, which
| results in lower borrowing costs for higher quality
| customers, as well as stopping debt spirals for people
| struggling.
|
| In the absence of credit scores, higher quality borrowers
| will be charged higher interest rates or require higher
| collateral, since they are less differentiated from
| average quality borrowers, and/or access to credit will
| be restricted to a narrower proportion of the population.
| dwattttt wrote:
| > In the absence of credit scores, higher quality
| borrowers will be charged higher interest rates or
| require higher collateral, since they are less
| differentiated from average quality borrowers, and/or
| access to credit will be restricted to a narrower
| proportion of the population.
|
| Given we're talking about alternatives here, I think this
| should be: "In the absence of credit scores, or some
| other mechanism for comparing potential borrowers".
| There's lots of ways to compare borrowers, and if you
| assume credit scores are the only way to do it, all your
| solutions are going to involve them.
| darawk wrote:
| The term 'credit score' is sufficiently general to
| encompass literally all methods of comparing borrowers.
| You could certainly take issue with some specifics of how
| particular agencies calculate it, but the idea that there
| is some "alternative way of comparing borrowers" then I'd
| invite you to invent another formula for determining loan
| parameters, that does not boil down to a scalar value.
|
| Loans involve the calculation of parameters. You can
| either choose those implicitly through personal
| knowledge, or explicitly through a scalar metric (credit
| score). There is no viable third option, and the first
| option is just a bad version of the second, in the end.
| scarab92 wrote:
| Yep.
|
| It's worth pointing out that credit scores actually are
| actually just the P(^default) expressed on an integer
| rather than fractional scale.
|
| There's also multiple credit scores, there are the scores
| computed by credit bureaus which look at your P(default)
| against all lenders, but many lenders also compute their
| own internal credit scores using models trained against
| their own customer base (and possibly also taking into
| account additional data that they hold about you).
| lodovic wrote:
| Credit scores often oversimplify risk, ignore nuanced
| factors, and can worsen financial struggles for those
| with low scores by pushing them toward higher costs.
| Countries without credit scores don't have higher
| interest rates or higher rates of defaulting. If we
| really want to, creditworthiness can be predicted more
| accurately and fairly with AI models, although that
| brings another level of bias.
| briandear wrote:
| > and can worsen financial struggles for those with low
| scores by pushing them toward higher costs.
|
| Shouldn't those costs be higher because of the increased
| risks they represent? If someone has a habit of not
| paying their debts, why would a lender take on the higher
| risk without getting paid more? They wouldn't, so they
| simply won't loan the money.
|
| However on the other side of this, nobody has to borrow
| money. If you don't borrow, credit scores are irrelevant.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _nobody has to borrow money. If you don't borrow,
| credit scores are irrelevant._
|
| Except if they want their own place to live.
|
| And for the period of about a decade or two, if they want
| to buy anything over the Internet. For some reason,
| e-commerce in its early years would _only_ accept credit
| cards. Took quite a while before debit cards started
| working for on-line shopping, and by that time, the
| damage was already done - credit cards got a boost in
| popularity both in the US and worldwide.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _creditworthiness can be predicted more accurately and
| fairly with AI models, although that brings another level
| of bias_
|
| I am used to the word "bias" meaning a specific kind of
| inaccuracy.
| oblio wrote:
| Wasn't the current system used in the US developed as a
| hack for a particular situation that then got extended
| for things it wasn't actually meant to do? I remember
| reading something about it in the Big Short.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| It's only "impossible" because of assumptions built into
| the current system.
| easywood wrote:
| I can assure you there are countries where a credit score
| does not exists, and people absolutely get loans and
| mortgages.
| pineaux wrote:
| As a counterpoint: Most countries in Europe don't really
| have credit scores, but mortgages still exist. We even
| balk at the idea of needing to take on debt to show you
| are good for it.
| fmbb wrote:
| Do you really believe creditors would just leave all that
| interest money on the table?
| szundi wrote:
| By, in my European country banks just check you up and
| you get your loan.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I just got a mortgage here in the Netherlands. No credit
| score.
| padjo wrote:
| This is great example of how people struggle to see
| possibilities beyond the environment they're raised in.
| The credit score system is not necessary to have loans
| and mortgages, as evidenced by all the countries that
| don't have such a system. The notion that you have to
| take on debt to "build up your score" is particularly
| absurd nonsense to most non Americans
| scarab92 wrote:
| A large component of interest rates is a risk premium that
| depends on the likelihood of a borrower defaulting.
|
| Credit scoring _significantly_ outperforms any other
| methodology for assessing default risk, including credit
| matricies and especially human assessments (humans are
| shockingly bad at assessing default risk, rarely much
| better than a biased coin flip).
|
| It's all well and good to say we should get rid of credit
| scores, but because they are so much more effective at
| assessing default risk than other methods, the consequence
| will be significantly higher rates of default, which means
| more people in financial hardship, and higher interest
| rates generally (though especially to low risk borrowers
| who will now be assessed as having closer-to-average
| default risk)
|
| It's also not often appreciated, but credit scoring is also
| the single best technique we have to stop people borrowing
| beyond their means and entering into financial hardship and
| debt spirals. There are other techniques that exist to
| identify at-risk borrowers but these alone aren't as good
| as an approach which also incorporates credit scores.
|
| As for explainability, unfortunately the best credit models
| are trained using AI techniques, which results in low
| explainability (since the risk signals are complex and
| multivariate). Older GLM approaches can be used, but aren't
| as good, so if we want high explainability, the trade off
| is worse performing credit models, and thus higher
| borrowing costs.
| immibis wrote:
| Can this function only be performed in secret or is it
| possible for this to be transparent and still work?
| scarab92 wrote:
| The challenge would be that there isn't just one "credit
| score". The scores published by bureau's exist more for
| marketing and as a stick to improve consumer behaviour.
|
| A credit bureau's real product is the credit file, which
| contains your history of inquiries, defaults,
| collections, court judgements etc. In some countries it
| also includes granular payment history information.
|
| From this file, many lenders compute their own internal
| credit scores. They do this because the credit scores
| published by the bureaus are the likelihood to default on
| any loan, however in practice consumers are often more
| likely to default on certain types of debt than others.
| Also, many lenders have additional data points that can
| be considered which the bureau's don't capture, such as
| the structure of the loan.
|
| If there's anything questionable going on (e.g. using
| variables which act as proxies for factors prohibited by
| ECOA or FHA) it will be occuring in these proprietary
| lender-specific models, however the parameters used in
| these models also embed commercial sensitive information
| about the behaviour of their customer base, so I doubt
| many lenders will be keen to release them.
| Zak wrote:
| I think much of the distaste for credit scores comes from
| their use for purposes other than making loans.
|
| I think it's reasonable for people to want a society
| where past financial difficulties (self-induced or
| otherwise) do not make it difficult for a person to get a
| job or rent an apartment. That's probably a reasonable
| preference to impose through legislation even if a credit
| score has predictive value for the legitimate interests
| of employers or landlords.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| So why not ask the prospective customers for the right to
| fetch and use their data? If it gives them better rates
| then people have plenty of incentives to allow them to
| continue.
| eptcyka wrote:
| And? The common person accepted cigarettes as part of their
| daily life, and leaded fuel, and many other things which
| should've been changed and ended up being changed. Do you
| think hackers like to leave the world as is?
| noirscape wrote:
| I mean, yes? Credit scores are forbidden in many countries
| because of how opaque they are and because of the data
| collection aspect.
|
| In a lot of countries, the only external thing the bank is
| allowed to use when you apply for a loan is whether or not
| you have existing loans (which is just to prevent you from
| borrowing money to pay off other borrowed money), the amount
| of money you make annually and what you currently have saved
| up.
| bloppe wrote:
| > I personally don't care about alternative app stores
|
| That's because it's difficult to imagine how alternative app
| stores would force first party app stores to be better, or risk
| losing business. For a start, everything would become much
| cheaper for you. They would also have a real incentive to
| provide new features and innovations. You don't have to switch
| to a third party app store to realize the benefits that follow
| from allowing them to exist.
| Someone wrote:
| > For a start, everything would become much cheaper for you
|
| That, I doubt. Most stuff already is dirt-cheap on the App
| Store (and riddled with ads). It's not like, for example,
| getting into Apple's App Store is so expensive that it adds
| dollars to the price of apps.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Merely being in the app store makes everything 30% more
| expensive! Including any subscriptions through the app,
| which is just ridiculous. This was the whole basis of the
| Epic lawsuit. And you can't tell people to sidestep the
| Apple cut by not putting the payment through them, that
| will get you banned from the app store.
| rahkiin wrote:
| You're saying if they drop the 30%, those cheap apps
| would cost 66 cents instead of 99?
|
| Or would they stay 99 and thus no change for the
| consumer?
|
| The DMA is about developer choice, not consumers
| vmg12 wrote:
| There will always be beneficial change for consumers if
| input costs drop in competitive markets. Markets are
| dynamic systems. Even if the costs don't drop, the person
| that is actually providing you value via the app will get
| the money where they can use it to hire more people to
| improve the product you use.
| moooo99 wrote:
| > The DMA is about developer choice, not consumers
|
| Ultimately it is about both. The idea behind that is
| pretty much the idea of capitalism: competition drives
| innovation.
|
| While I personally do not care about the alternative
| stores, I care very much about stuff like the in app
| purchases. I am not using Apples subscriptions and all
| the rules and steps to circumvent the rules make it
| horribly inconvenient to deal with subscriptions.
|
| I also hate the fact that I cannot buy an ebook in app
| because of Apple's 30% cut
| ben_w wrote:
| I think that profit margin would often, though perhaps
| not always, go to the developers rather to the consumers.
| That some already offer same thing at 30% discount on
| their website may be a sign of cheaper future, or may be
| a way to get price sensitive people to buy more.
|
| Subs, kinda agree.
|
| Also it's only 30% for the top of the market (15% for a
| lot of apps), and only for digital goods (so not my
| banking apps or Amazon), and it has to be stuff bought in
| app (so not two of my last three employers).
|
| And even 30% was good when it was new. Only looks bad now
| because the market grew so much -- but the market did
| grow, and I was expecting monopoly action around when
| they first passed one trillion dollar valuation.
|
| With Epic especially, that felt like one arrogant giant
| swiping at another giant. Especially due to concerns that
| Fortnite was designed to be addictive, that loot boxes
| are gambling.
| briandear wrote:
| Devs under $1 million pay only 15%.. that's far less than
| the retail markup of items in your local grocery store.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-
| program...
|
| I think many, especially smaller, developers don't
| realize the value they get for that commission:
| distribution, payment processing, billing, tax
| processing/collection, dispute handling, marketing (i.e.
| a storefront,) management of versions/updates for users,
| not to mention security benefits (for users.)
|
| If people don't like that, nothing is stopping them from
| choosing not to sell to Apple device owners. If Apple
| device owners don't like it, they can switch to a
| competitor.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Apple is on record that the 15% cut applies to a
| vanishingly small amount of App Store purchases. So it's
| not particularly meaningful.
| oblio wrote:
| > Devs under $1 million pay only 15%.. that's far less
| than the retail markup of items in your local grocery
| store.
|
| So now we're competing with the "local grocery store",
| even on the "information superhighway"?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > If people don't like that, nothing is stopping them
| from choosing not to sell to Apple device owners. If
| Apple device owners don't like it, they can switch to a
| competitor.
|
| The whole point of this regulation is to enable both
| sides to make that choice without having to give up on
| the iPhone and the rest of their app purchases etc. in
| that ecosystem.
| moooo99 wrote:
| But we're not talking about a grocery store as a
| comparison, we're dealing primarily with transaction
| processing.
|
| And for that Apples IAP fee of 30% is about ten times
| higher than elsewhere.
| vmg12 wrote:
| Things are more than 30% more expensive. For a developer
| to get the same profit on the apple app store with Apple
| taking 30% of revenue they have to charge 43% more.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| > Most stuff already is dirt-cheap on the App Store (and
| riddled with ads).
|
| Are we using the same App Store? Anything of worth is
| behind a $10 monthly subscription. Apple has intentionally
| made subscriptions the only viable commercial model on the
| App Store. Then they take 30% (with some exceptions). They
| forbid competition, so developers aren't free to distribute
| to iOS customers in any other way.
| happymellon wrote:
| Your missing the $100 developer fee. Just Apple nickel
| and diming in every way possible.
|
| It's riddled with adverts because it's the only way to
| get revenue out of such a terrible system.
| dijit wrote:
| "I hate apple"
|
| "I love valve"
|
| ... but they have exactly the same business model, and
| people genuinely promote valve as if they _want_ it to be
| a monopoly. (though I am aware that it 's not one now-
| first-party launchers are universally reviled by gamers).
| jonhohle wrote:
| Steam was not appreciated when it launched. It made a
| foothold as a requirement for HL2. Valve has done a good
| job making relatively painless over the last 20 years,
| but it was originally reviled.
| fph wrote:
| And didn't Apple also have 20 years time to make their
| app store better?
| happymellon wrote:
| > they have exactly the same business model
|
| I'm not sure how.
|
| Valve allow you to install whatever game store you want
| on the Steam Deck. They win custom by making a better
| experience than everyone else, Apple win because they
| have formed an environment where you have no other
| option.
|
| If Apple wanted the same business model, they would allow
| alternative storefronts, they wouldn't block updates if
| they decided they didn't like you anymore, and they
| wouldn't block you from even replacing the OS on the
| device you bought if you wanted to.
|
| In fact, I'm not entirely sure apart from running stores
| that they are the same thing at all.
| Someone wrote:
| > Apple has intentionally made subscriptions the only
| viable commercial model on the App Store
|
| How do you think Apple has done that? They've always had
| the option for a one-time payment for apps, and those can
| be fairly high ($999,99 until December 2022 and $10,000
| after that time, according to
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/6/23496734/apple-app-
| store-...)
|
| Even if Apple did that, I don't see any evidence that was
| intentional.
|
| I think it's more that the market has spoken, and said
| that "you can't sell $100 apps on the App Store". And
| even then, there are counterexamples.
|
| The only thing Apple may hav head to do with that is that
| it 'gave' zillions of developers visibility for their
| $0,99 apps on the App Store. That may have led users to
| think software should be cheap.
| Zak wrote:
| A difficulty developers have cited is that it isn't
| possible to have paid major version upgrades while
| keeping the same identity (links, reviews, etc...) for an
| app.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > For a start, everything would become much cheaper for you.
|
| That's such a fallacy that pro alt-app store people like to
| trot out. What evidence do you have that will happen? Are you
| basing it one the assumption that if devs no longer pay Apple
| a cut that the devs would lower their prices? Why do you
| think that would happen and the devs wouldn't just leave
| prices where they are and keep this cut no longer going to
| Apple? Why would devs leave that money on the table? Why do
| you think the alt-store would also not take the same cut or
| only slightly lower? Why would they leave money on the table?
|
| At the end of the day, the biggest alt-store push is by devs
| wanting more money in their pockets, not the end users.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| Are you questioning the basic function of competition in a
| free market? Why would devs lower prices? Because other
| devs would release better apps cheaper.
| dylan604 wrote:
| No, I'm questioning your belief in the charity of
| developers or their lack of greed. "Better apps cheaper"
| is also a fallacy. If that were the case, they'd be doing
| it on whatever app store is available, not just some alt-
| store.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The same dev will often literally sell you the same
| IAP/subscription off their own website for 30% less. Under
| the current system.
| Nursie wrote:
| > For a start, everything would become much cheaper for you.
|
| People say this, but of all the apps I have on my phone, I'm
| not sure I actually paid for any. Browser, smart-device
| controllers, a few games, streaming services (that I pay for
| direct), messengers of various sorts, banking, transport,
| ticketing, government apps.
|
| I know people must pay for apps as Apple make a lot of money
| off it, but it's not really something I do.
| oblio wrote:
| We can add this comment as a data point of 1 and compare
| this to the tens of billions Apple makes from the AppStore,
| then we can try to figure out which side is more relevant
| for lawmakers (who inherently have to lean towards
| statistics).
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Yeah this is called cross subsidies, people acting like
| every app need to pay tbh
|
| most app/games etc is freemium and I can tell you that
| smaller people that pay is subsidies the system because
| most if not all people using it freely
| swat535 wrote:
| For those advocating for multiple app stores, I have a 2
| questions.
|
| EU users might be best suited to respond, as they are
| currently experiencing this change (though I believe the
| impact will be different once it's rolled out globally).
|
| 1. How do you think having multiple app stores will affect
| user experience and app discoverability? It seems likely that
| not all apps will be available in every store, meaning users
| may have to search across multiple platforms to find what
| they need.
|
| We've seen similar issues in the gaming industry, where each
| company has its own launcher, or in the movie industry, where
| content is locked behind different providers, making it
| difficult to figure out where to access it. This is why
| platforms like Netflix and Steam initially succeeded.
|
| Meanwhile, the Windows/PC model has shown that an open
| ecosystem can be a security and privacy nightmare for the
| average user.
|
| 2. On that note, how do you envision ensuring privacy and
| security in these alternative app stores? Risks could range
| from major tech companies like Google or Facebook running
| their own stores and collecting even more user data, to
| scammers creating fake stores that steal credit card
| information.
| latexr wrote:
| I'll speak only for iOS since that's what I'm most familiar
| with.
|
| The important thing to realise is that no one wanted
| alternative stores. Not really. What everyone wanted was
| for the existing store to not be stressful oppressive
| garbage. If Apple didn't have draconian rules where they
| charge too high margins and repeatedly reject apps for
| stupid petty reasons, they wouldn't have found themselves
| in this situation. The other big players would even likely
| accept having to sell via in-app purchases (offering better
| consistent protection to consumers) if Apple weren't
| egregiously eating into their margins.
|
| Don't take my word for it, we have (now public) internal
| emails where Apple executives discuss these very issues and
| question how long they could keep it up.
|
| Alternative stores were the next best thing. When it became
| clear that Apple wouldn't fix their behaviour, the only
| choice was to fight for legislation where they don't have
| as much of a say. Make no mistake, they (Tim Cook in
| particular) brought it on themselves.
|
| As to your specific questions:
|
| 1. App discoverability has been unusable for years. The App
| Store is the last place where I look for apps.
|
| 2. The App Store is already filled with privacy-violating
| apps and scams. Apple ensures jack shit. Scammers don't
| need to create fake stores, they are already doing pretty
| well for themselves in the main store selling flashlight
| apps with expensive weekly subscriptions.
|
| Is this situation worse for non-technical users? Maybe.
| Right now there are big scary warning when trying to add
| third-party stores, and that does make some sense. But
| Apple will have to get off their ass and make better
| privacy protections at the OS level.
| rawbot wrote:
| I also don't really care about alternative app stores, I just
| want to be able to develop apps without paying a license or
| abusing a testing system (Apple, Testflight), and be able to
| install them without "jailbreaking" my device.
|
| That's the reason why even with its warts, I have been a very
| happy Android user. It's my device, and I can modify it to
| become whatever I want it to be (with some constrains that
| don't really affect me atm).
| josephg wrote:
| Yeah I'm an Apple user and this is one reason I'd consider
| switching. I don't mind consoles like the switch or PS2 being
| sold at a loss, and making it up via expensive games. But
| Apple double dips here. They make a profit on my phone. Then
| they charge a crazy marketplace fee for the App Store. Then
| they have the gall to charge 3rd party companies for access
| to the NFC chips in our devices. It's outrageous.
|
| Is it my device or not, Apple?
| DownrightNifty wrote:
| > I personally don't care about alternative app stores
|
| I've seen this sentiment a couple of times here and I think
| it's the wrong framing on what the EU is trying to do. Third
| party app stores aren't the point; they're just a vehicle
| enabling users to choose which software they want to use
| without interference from Apple. The indie devs using AltStore
| PAL don't all necessarily _want_ to use it, but they 're forced
| to because of the way Apple chose to implement DMA compliance.
|
| In fact, the DMA doesn't even explicitly require that
| gatekeepers allow third party app stores; they can only allow
| direct distribution (e.g. via web sites) instead, if they want
| (this is to the best of my understanding of the text, but
| IANAL).
|
| When you say you don't care about alternative app stores, what
| you're really saying is that you don't care about the end
| user's ability to use apps that aren't approved by Apple. That
| is certainly an opinion that many folks have, but I'd prefer
| that they refrain from hiding behind the shield of "third party
| app stores are weird and who even cares", whether deliberately
| or not.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| > In fact, the DMA doesn't even explicitly require that
| gatekeepers allow third party app stores; they can only allow
| direct distribution (e.g. via web sites) instead, if they
| want.
|
| Is Apple actually complying with the DMA then? They are still
| requiring notarization, which means apps still have to be
| approved by them.
| DownrightNifty wrote:
| The DMA allows Apple to take "strictly necessary and
| proportionate" measures to ensure that alternative apps do
| not "endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating
| system". IMO iOS notarization (which is a different and
| more involved process with many more rules than
| notarization on macOS) goes well beyond that, but it's up
| to the EU to decide.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Having grown up through ad-bars, Windows malware, email worms
| and everything else that could go wrong for most people
| during the late 90s on and not wanting to do IT for my entire
| extended family, I don't mind having a popular platform with
| guardrails. Unfortunately, I think providing non-curated
| access and opening up platform features that are currently
| gated by security features to unscrupulous actors will make
| things worse for more people than it will help. After over 15
| years of iPhone use, I've never had any of the problems that
| plague PCs and I attribute a lot of that to a restrictive app
| distribution model, sandboxing, etc.
|
| End users can (and do!) use apps not approved by Apple on
| mobile devices every day. They just do it on something that's
| not an iPhone (or have the capability to jailbreak their
| iPhone and know what they're getting themselves into). Corps
| and devs can also run custom software without Apple approval.
| I'm personally fine with that delineation and I'd much rather
| have stronger GDPR-like and property laws.
| DownrightNifty wrote:
| Some good points overall, and I think I agree in a lot of
| ways, actually.
|
| > (or have the capability to jailbreak their iPhone and
| know what they're getting themselves into)
|
| It is a common misconception that people can "just"
| jailbreak their iPhone if they're not happy with the walled
| garden. This requires someone finding a critical-impact
| zero day vulnerability in iOS, quite literally worth around
| half a million dollars [1]. Apple is hard at work as we
| speak trying their hardest to prevent those from slipping
| in -- and that is a good thing, in general. It's not
| currently possible to jailbreak any up-to-date iOS device.
|
| I'm all for sandboxing and other iOS security features; I'm
| not proposing that we get rid of any of that. Sideloaded
| apps would presumably still be fully sandboxed, and would
| still only be able to access sensitive data with explicit
| user consent. This is very different than the situation on
| Windows, where in 2025 you can still double click an .exe
| and instantly have all of your passwords and credit cards
| stolen (not an exaggeration; this literally happens).
|
| I'm also not against the idea of making it difficult enough
| to enable sideloading so as to make social engineering
| attacks against grandma effectively impossible. This is
| what Chromebooks are doing; nerds get root, but grandma
| doesn't.
|
| However, the DMA is more concerned with delivering
| alternative apps to everyone than it is concerned with
| empowering techies. So I can see why you might not support
| it even if you want to have a little more control over your
| phone, as a techie.
|
| [1] https://archive.is/9jdW7
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| > digital "purchases" are transferrable and have all of the
| rights and privileges afforded to physical goods.
|
| I concur. We need to establish a "secondary markets act", which
| would allow individuals to transact accounts and digital items
| worth under a certain amount (let's say $10k, as a non-waivable
| right, so it wouldn't apply to larger B2B contracts).
| Essentially, these things should be viewed as property of the
| consumer and be freely sold. Without the freedom to transact,
| there can't be a free market.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Why shouldn't it apply to larger contracts?
|
| There is a very easy way to get around such a requirement
| from legislation: Just call it _licensing_ instead of a
| purchase.
|
| The need for such a legislation is corporations reckless use
| of the words "purchase" and "buy" for goods that have been
| licensed.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| > very easy way to get around such a requirement from
| legislation: Just call it licensing instead of a purchase.
|
| Licensing should come with enhanced consumer rights e.g. an
| explicit license duration and allow the consumer to return
| the license for pro-rata refund within that duration. The
| license should be for the IP and honoured for all formats
| and platforms that meet some regularity threshold. The
| absurdity of having to rebuy things you "own" because you
| switch device or format has to end.
|
| Along similar lines, hardware should be called "hire" not
| "sell" when the manufacturer maintains control over the
| device e.g. locked bootloaders, encryption keys, online
| service dependencies, forced updates with no downgrade,
| remote-access privileges, telemetry, not meeting "right-to-
| repair", hardware locking preventing component replacement
| or choice of consumable (e.g. ink) etc.
|
| Similar return rights should apply if hardware is leased.
| Seller would need to be insured/escrow to meet consumer
| refunds if they break their side of the lease (e.g. going
| bust and shutting down required online services).
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| This is a part of it, but I don't think it's all there is.
| Words mean little when there is such a large power and
| information asymmetry between consumers and sellers.
|
| The law should formalize the concepts of rentals (licenses)
| and purchases. Purchases create non-waivable rights of
| transferability and allows the owner to demand compensation
| when a service closes: for example if I shut down my movie
| platform, you should get to download a copy of everything
| you own.
|
| Licenses on the other hand do not confer such rights, but
| should still be transferable under a certain value and have
| a set period during which its terms must be fulfilled,
| otherwise the licensee needs to be compensated. No "we
| change the terms at our sole discretion at any moment"
| nonsense.
|
| Vendors can give you extra rights (like prorated returns or
| exchanges), but they can't take any of the codified rights
| away. I assume there needs to be some details about
| companies just setting a license of one day but never
| revokes access to avoid the regulation, but someone smarter
| than me can probably figure that out.
|
| For larger licenses I think the customer (usually
| customers) has a greater negotiating leverage, so it isn't
| as necessary to codify these terms, but of course this is
| contingent on there not existing trillion-dollar
| corporations, which is not the world we live in.
| kbolino wrote:
| But _licensing_ is a very obfuscatory word. What are the
| terms of the licenses? Consumers don 't really know and
| they vary widely anyway.
|
| Buying may have been a misnomer but it had some useful
| baggage that is shed with the terminology shift.
| oneplane wrote:
| That secondary markets thing has been an earlier subject (but
| not really covering app stores etc at that time), there were
| issues where larger companies didn't want you selling CD Keys
| or Windows license keys you weren't using, and they didn't
| want the ones that were bought in one market to be used in
| another (i.e. grey market import etc). I think they (the EU)
| ended up telling the corporations to suck it up since whoever
| owns the thing is free to sell it when they don't want it
| anymore.
|
| This is of course also a factor in the move to subscriptions
| since you'd no longer own a persistent license or product and
| as such there's nothing to sell. Ironically this should also
| mean the 'product' (subscription) has far less value than the
| actual product, even if it's technically the same
| system/software. Yet subscriptions are more costly than a
| one-off you repeat every couple of years. Sigh.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The problem with enforcing resellability on digital goods is
| the technical ability to copy them.
|
| If I have full ownership of a digital good, then I have the
| ability to copy it.
|
| Any limitation of my ability to copy requiring removing some
| control from the owner and escrowing it with another party
| (e.g. DRM).
|
| As much as I hate to say it, allowing digital good resale is
| a good use for a blockchain: uniquely identifying an instance
| and then keeping a decentralized ledger of who owns it at any
| time.
|
| However, there would still need to be a carrot to make this
| system attractive.
|
| If there isn't, then why wouldn't people just create infinite
| copies off-ledger and ignore it?
|
| And without any viable digital goods ownership system, who
| wouldn't companies default to the current model of only
| offering licenses / subscriptions?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I hate that crypto ever had this big money swell associated
| with it. If we could divorce the technical protocols from
| the scams and shilling people associate with it, it
| actually has some interesting uses that barely anyone is
| willing to talk about it a non-shill or non-disgust way.
| dingnuts wrote:
| yeah people in this thread are fumbling around in the
| dark pining for something they don't realize is.. NFTs
|
| resaleable digital licenses. that's why Steam banned
| them, not because Valve is noble but because if your
| video game license was an NFT you could resell it outside
| of their marketplace and they like their little monopoly
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| GoG survives selling DRM free games. Unsure if this would
| work on all markets.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| Piracy has always existed and will always exist. The issue
| is that it only takes one determined pirate to overcome the
| DRM and that piece of information is freed from DRM. You
| can already do all this even without a legally recognized
| right of ownership.
|
| I assume plenty of people are willing to pay for things
| they appreciate. Maybe the carrot can be some kind of
| recognition: you get to make a digital signature from that
| token that you can display as a part of your digital
| identity. There could be discussion forums that require you
| to have such a token to participate in.
| pbronez wrote:
| Yes. This is the killer app for blockchain. I want Movies
| Anywhere, but for everything and without an industry
| gatekeeper. If I am subscribed to Netflix, I should be able
| to watch every video in their catalog through any service
| that has the bits.
| areyourllySorry wrote:
| the issue with transferrable digital goods is that they are
| also much more easier to steal. see robux, giftcards,
| bitcoins...
| ryandrake wrote:
| We could probably implement your first thing but just extending
| HIPAA to cover all entities, not just health care providers.
| HIPAA's privacy, security, data selling, and breach
| notification rules are exactly what we need and could
| effectively apply to any business.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Couching your stance towards a policy in terms of its effect on
| "innovation" is a surefire way to lose me.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| This is phrasing targeted at the current administration. Using
| words like "ethics" has no effect on them.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I would not change my language to that preferred by the
| segregationist political movement that has seized power but
| then I was born with a spine and not everyone is so lucky.
| tempodox wrote:
| You can't both have a spine and only exist to make money.
| seydor wrote:
| The outcome of the dma is better served by breaking up the
| companies so that google cannot share data with YouTube or
| facebook with Whatsapp.
|
| The EU regulations so far did not achieve much (other than
| eradicating EU ads market) , and the YC knows that.
|
| They want to distract the government away from breaking up
| bigtech and towards an anodyne (but annoying) regulation.
| raverbashing wrote:
| So, when was the last time a company was split by the SEC or
| such? I can only think of older examples (Boeing, AT&T, etc)
|
| What I think regulators are seeing is that they split, wait a
| bit then merge all over again, negating that effect
|
| And I agree about the GDPR, though the DMA seems to have had
| bigger effects (including preventing EU from getting the wet
| dud known as Apple Intelligence - I guess we can recognize this
| was a cop-out from Apple for a poor product instead of an
| actual hurdle)
| patrickmcnamara wrote:
| The DMA does make it so you can unlink your Google account from
| your YouTube account, or your Facebook account from your
| Instagram account, and that they can't share data. Or what are
| you meaning?
| ankit219 wrote:
| Supporting a policy or a regulation which looks at just
| competition with zero incentives to care for users because it may
| help the portfolio is not a good look. People may argue
| otherwise, but DMA exists to make sure the gatekeepers lose
| market share to their rivals, even if it comes at the expense of
| consumers. Eg: Google asked to remove maps from their search
| page, which means a user has to do extra clicks to get to the
| info they want. Bad experience yes. And now, they still did not
| lose market share so EU is asking google to do more.
|
| I am not against the spirit of the act, but their goal is to
| listen to competition and ask for changes accordingly. If it
| screws up users, so be it. There would be no winning. Yes, google
| search is a monopoly, and should not be so big. The act is
| unbalanced.
|
| A lot of proponents of iMessage example miss out that WhatsApp
| won outside of USA. By just building a better product and
| utilizing network effects.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| > And now, they still did not lose market share so EU is asking
| google to do more.
|
| Can you elaborate on that?
| ankit219 wrote:
| So, after the first round of compliances, they did a review
| of the changes and did meetings with the likes of Yelp etc.
| This led to the next round of changes.[1] I am for the
| changes, just that I think you should also look at it from
| user perspective too, especially when what the user wants vs
| the competitor wants is conflicting.
|
| [1]: https://www.wsj.com/tech/google-proposes-further-
| changes-to-...
| owebmaster wrote:
| We should not pay more to Google/Apple to do less clicks, they
| use the same logic to make it difficult to cancel or stop
| paying for things. You seem to be confused about what screwing
| up users mean.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| > DMA exists to make sure the gatekeepers lose market share to
| their rivals, even if it comes at the expense of consumers.
|
| It sounds like you're not very familiar with the DMA. Most of
| the regulations have direct benefits to both consumers and
| developers. From the consumer side, it permits me to:
|
| * Install any software I like, including software Apple doesn't
| like. For the longest time Apple wouldn't let me install
| Microsoft xCloud. It was only after the DMA that the loosened
| this restriction. Ditto for emulators. They still forbid many
| apps focused on gambling, porn, and cryptocurrencies.
|
| * Install any App Store and choose to make it default. I can
| choose a default browser now. Soon I will be allowed to choose
| a default navigation software. It's INSANE that this was locked
| down until the DMA.
|
| * Use third party payment providers and choose to make them
| default. Why should I be forced to use Apple Pay?
|
| * Use any voice assistant and choose to make it default. Siri
| is the worst of all personal assistants. Why can't I use
| another one?
|
| * User any browser and browser engine and choose to make it
| default. The fact that Apple forces everyone to use WebKit in
| 2025 is nothing other than a farce.
|
| * Use any messaging app and choose to make it default. I am
| currently forced to use Apple's SMS app.
|
| * Make core messaging functionality interoperable. They lay out
| concrete examples like file transfer.
|
| * Use existing hardware and software features without
| competitive prejudice. E.g. NFC. A focus area for the
| Commission is cloud backup. Apple currently doesn't permit the
| use of competing cloud backup provides, or one's own, for that
| matter. iOS can _only_ be backed up to Apple servers, and other
| apps on a per-app basis.
|
| * Not preference their services. This includes CTAs in settings
| to encourage users to subscribe to Gatekeeper services, and
| ranking their own services above others in selection and
| advertising portals
|
| * Much, much, more.
|
| This is before we have explored the various ways the DMA
| improves the competitive landscape. Apple is clearly abusing
| their dominant market position to block competition. This is
| always bad for everyone except the one company in the dominant
| position.
| ankit219 wrote:
| I did not mention apple in my comment. And what you wrote
| does not contradict what i wrote.
|
| If they truly started with customers, perhaps we can agree
| that having to click another site to get to a simple one line
| answer is wrong. Thats why people prefer LLMs, they get the
| answer without having to click to multiple sites. But it's
| good for competition. In cases where customers and
| competition is at odds, ideally the law should favor
| customers. Except in EU, it favors competition. Customers
| dont have a seat at the table, competition does.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| > I did not mention apple in my comment. And what you wrote
| does not contradict what i wrote.
|
| I believe it does. You wrote that the DMA is intended to
| make gatekeepers lose market share, "even if it comes at
| the expense of consumers." Clearly this is coming at the
| expense of no consumers. On the contrary. This is a major
| improvement to way we use these essential products. I
| provided concrete examples of the iPhone that I use. This
| is a _major_ win for consumers across the EU. It 's also a
| major win for competitors. The only company it hurts (ever
| so slightly) is Apple and a handful of other trillion
| dollar companies, and I think they'll be just fine.
|
| As for "intending" to make gatekeepers lose market share,
| one could argue that all anti-competitive laws "intend" to
| make market abusers lose market share. We still consider
| anti-competitive laws a net good for the market and
| society.
| cropcirclbureau wrote:
| Strange to use WhatsApp and "utilizing network effects" as part
| of your rhetoric. Haven't they been commonly used to harm
| users?
|
| And to address your general argument, I don't think bad UX can
| be put in the same category of harm as monopolistic market
| manipulation. Of course you can have the most integrated,
| slickest, most clairvoyant apps if you're Google. They have the
| money, data and access for it. And you could justify walled
| gardens for this but not abuse of monopoly. It's unbelievably
| shortsighted to do so.
| h1fra wrote:
| Next time your startup is saying "no politics allowed in our
| company" remember this kind of announcement.
| gdedhitchhiker wrote:
| Worker 17 needs to get access to their app to complete their
| work!
| aurelien wrote:
| Well, the American credit scrore is made of ketamine ... EU do
| not need, nor have to respect any deal with a country under
| addictive substance.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > Well, the American credit scrore is made of ketamine
|
| Source?
| malthaus wrote:
| i can't believe the elon musk anti-hype train turned ketamine
| (which is pretty non-addictive as far as drugs go) into the
| posterchild drug, impressive
| Cupprum wrote:
| Sex workers in Bangkok pay around 10% of their salaries to the
| bars where people can find the workers.
|
| Apple and other companies take around 30% as a fee for using
| their marketplace.
|
| I don't see a reason why big tech should get a higher cut.
| thrance wrote:
| I don't see why they should get any cut, do you pay Dell
| whenever you install a game on your laptop?
| 9283409232 wrote:
| This is a silly argument and I'm sure you know it.
| thrance wrote:
| It's silly in that it shows how ridiculous the situation
| is. No one asked for Apple or Google to be the wardens of
| what users can or can't install on their devices. Asking
| for a fee for this "service" is the cherry on top.
|
| We've been able to install whatever we want on our PCs
| since the dawn of personal computing and it never was an
| issue. I don't see why we couldn't have a similar system on
| mobile devices too.
| ryandrake wrote:
| We should also apply the same logic to game consoles. Why
| should Sony get a cut of every game I buy? It's not like
| they even have hosting costs associated with it--I'm
| buying a physical game from a store. Why should I need to
| get Nintendo's blessing in order to make a game for
| Switch? Why can't I download games directly from the game
| developer's web site for any of these console platforms?
| thrance wrote:
| Are you arguing that mobile devices are closer to game
| consoles than personal computers? Because I really don't
| think they are.
|
| Also, why even defend the right of megacorps to lock
| users in their walled garden? What could society or even
| you possibly win through this?
|
| I am certainly not opposed to gaming companies opening
| their SDKs and consoles to hobbyists.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think I didn't communicate well: I am all for forcing
| game consoles to also open up. If one can argue against
| walled gardens for mobile devices (and I would), the same
| argument works for game consoles, too. They're both, at
| their cores, general purpose computers that just have DRM
| and restrictive licensing slathered all over them.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| In the 90s we DID apply the same logic to game consoles.
| Sony, Nintendo, and Sega all lost or settled court cases
| that established a precedent of interoperability.
|
| Sega's trademark rights were literally ignored as a "Fair
| Use" for a 3rd party to be able to release games for
| Sega's console, because the alternative was that it would
| be impossible to legally release a third party game
| cartridge, which the court did not like as an outcome.
|
| But then we got the DMCA and laws and rules that make it
| not legal to circumvent DRM in an attempt to do the
| normal Fair Use things. That's the primary legal limit to
| running whatever you want on consoles. Companies were
| given the legal right to make a technical protection of
| their IP, and if you tried to get around those technical
| measures to do things that you had a legitimate and legal
| case to do, you would still fall afoul of the law.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention
|
| Basically the DMCA completely obliterated the previous
| "You can't prevent a third party from touching your stuff
| after you sell it" that was status quo before. There's
| all sorts of vagaries in US copyright law about Fair Uses
| and "legal backups" but the DMCA destroys all of that.
| All you have to do is encrypt or even just xor your
| program/movie/whatever with a simple key and suddenly
| it's completely illegal to use any tool other than one
| provided or licensed by that company to interact with
| that data. It's insane.
|
| The courts had given americans fairly strong property
| rights with digital property, much more closely aligning
| with rights for physical items and the doctrine of first
| sale, but the DMCA destroyed all that, because that's
| what IP companies wanted.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| There are some people who are indeed asking for that and
| I have no problem with app stores taking a cut for
| publishing and marketing on their stores as long as there
| are other paths for people to get apps on devices.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Are you an LLM? Because you seem to have advanced an
| argument that you just called silly.
|
| edit: maybe pull the entire thread into the prompt,
| rather than just the comment you're replying to?
| Preprocess to add some context around previous replies so
| you know they're yours? Not knowing anything about your
| previous responses is a tell.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| The initial comment I replied to said "why would you pay
| Dell to install a game?" No one is making that argument.
| It is a strawman and that is in fact silly. App stores
| absolutely have the right to charge a cut to be on their
| platform and I have no problem with that as long as there
| are other means of getting apps on devices. I'm not sure
| what isn't clear here.
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| Did I download the game from Dell's servers? Was the game
| made using tools authored by Dell? Did the game go through a
| quality assurance process run by Dell? I know at one point
| they ran a digital distribution platform and I'd be highly
| surprised if they weren't charging some sort of fee.
| eloisius wrote:
| Are you allowed to download a game from someone else's
| servers or forego all the quality assurance that they've
| done?
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| Any claim of fees for hosting a distribution platform is
| nullified by the lack of alternatives. I don't get to
| kidnap you can then charge you rent and food costs.
| ben_w wrote:
| The main thing that reduces the value of hosting is that
| it's become cheaper over the years. Back when the App
| Store was new, privately hosting shareware games on my
| own domain was a substantial cost, IIRC around 10% of my
| total income from those games.
|
| But it's somewhat hyperbolic to compare a mandatory cost
| that you have to pay to someone regardless, to being
| kidnapped.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _But it 's somewhat hyperbolic to compare a mandatory
| cost that you have to pay to someone regardless, to being
| kidnapped._
|
| It's not hyperbolic when you don't have a choice in who
| you're paying.
| ben_w wrote:
| There are many cases where I have no choice in who (or
| how much) I pay, that are not kidnapping.
|
| Monopolistic practices are their own thing. Bad for very
| different reasons than kidnapping.
| permo-w wrote:
| did you misread "should" as "shouldn't"? I know I did on
| first read
| c16 wrote:
| I think where this will fall on deaf ears is due to its branding.
|
| ~Europe's~ America's Digital Markets Act might work better with
| this administration, irrespective of how good or bad the content
| contained within it is.
|
| In terms of what to focus your efforts on, this can be re-
| evaluated in a few years time when staff will actually dig in,
| beyond the optics.
| s_dev wrote:
| This is absolutely not what I would have expected.
|
| I love Paul Graham but he's always criticised the EU for having
| too much of a heavy hand regulating things and 'stifling
| innovation' while there is plenty of room for nuance here -- the
| EU can be doing both. I think this suggests many in YCombinator
| are not as 'Libertarian' as they originally thought and there
| small mindset change happening.
| lblume wrote:
| By this point, it should be fairly clear that unregulated
| markets lead to monopolies. If modern libertarianism still
| entails "the freer the markets, the freer the people" I would
| consider this to be empirically disproven[1].
|
| [1] Except for minimal states which have not succeeded in
| reality because some type of strong organization's force will
| likely always exceed the market's implicit one.
| s_dev wrote:
| I'm hoping YCs next 'big' move for growth is to open an
| accelerator in either the UK or the EU. The US is moving in
| the wrong direction and the EU needs institutions like YC.
| Plenty have tried and failed to replicate YCs success both in
| the US and the EU but I think YC could make it happen.
| thecleaner wrote:
| YCs success has nothing to do with just YC (not to take
| credit away) but rather from the fact that the US is a
| large unified well-regulated market. EU has sensible rules
| sure but the market isnt unified and the individual
| countries dont have big enough markets to sustain large
| numbers of software companies. YC itself is honestly quite
| open with their knowledge but its just that EU in itself is
| a pretty terrible place to run a business. Lots if
| regulation, some good ones.
| malthaus wrote:
| you have to judge people for their actions, not their
| philosophical essays.
|
| ycombinator (which, nota bene, also spawned sam) is nothing but
| distilled capitalism with a fig leaf to appeal to a subset of
| nerd culture and you all ate it up
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| If you are against heavy handed regulations I think supporting
| the DMA is only logically as those regulations are now coming
| from gatekeepers such as Apple or Google so limiting them in
| what they are allowed to do is fully compatible with this
| mindest I believe.
| s_dev wrote:
| The Libertarian philosophy is concerned with limiting the
| powers of government not companies.
|
| I think people are seeing that companies can wield as much
| power and influence as governments can and yet have no
| democratic mandate or similar accountability mechanisms that
| we impose on governments.
| paxys wrote:
| It's hard to believe that so many Americans, including prominent
| industry leaders like YC, are so delusional about the political
| situation in America today. You are not getting such regulation.
| You aren't getting any regulation. If rules do pass it will be
| because of politics and corruption, not the public good.
| boxed wrote:
| Self fulfilling prophecy.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Does the law define criteria by which gatekeeper companies are
| identified, or does it explicitly call out six companies for
| scrutiny?
|
| In the US, in general, that kind of targeted law is highly
| frowned upon (bills of attainder were a tool the King used to
| target political opponents and the Constitution wrote them out as
| a result).
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Breaking up monopolies used to be one of America's greatest
| strengths--Standard Oil, AT&T, even Microsoft faced real
| antitrust action. That willingness to enforce competition fueled
| economic growth and innovation.
|
| But under Trump, there's little chance of that happening. Big
| Tech has only grown more entrenched, and instead of being
| challenged, it's likely to gain even more influence. The era of
| real trust-busting is over for now, and these companies aren't
| going anywhere. I hope for the best in future.
|
| I'm interested how it would be with Musk. He has enormous
| influence over the markets but he is not an "company" but an
| individual. I wonder how this would be resolved. I guess just let
| him choose what he can keep? That's sounds fishy to me.
| yatopifo wrote:
| I take it the legislative branch is completely irrelevant in the
| US at this point... how quickly you gave adapted to living under
| a dictatorship!
| VagabundoP wrote:
| Big tech has always driven me mad with how they leverage their
| monoplies once they reach a certain size.
|
| Why can't I swap cloud backends on the mobile platforms?
|
| I shouldnt need a gmail/icloud account to setup an android/ios
| device. Open those api's and let me use another hosted service or
| host my own.
|
| After a device becomes unsupported release the unlock codes or
| whatever. At that point it becomes a security hazard anyway. I
| should be able to create custom roms/software to keep using it if
| I want.
| enriquec wrote:
| "unlock codes or whatever"
|
| As an engineer, I can tell you it's not even easy to keep
| things working internally - let alone support every possible
| integration. Just because it's easy to say, doesn't mean it's
| feasible to do.
|
| But if you're convinced its what people want, there's nothing
| preventing you from making it your life - like other people
| have done with their strategies.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I appreciate the engineering perspective, and you're right
| that supporting every integration isn't trivial.
|
| Is there a difference between providing an "unlock code" upon
| deprecation, and requiring "support for every possible
| integration"(?)?
|
| Setting that aside, it seems it not every possible
| combination needs official support, but rather that providing
| an open or documented way for motivated users or communities
| to build upon or repurpose devices would be beneficial. Many
| projects exist precisely because tech companies allowed or at
| least tolerated community-driven solutions.
|
| It's less about expecting everything to be effortless for the
| original manufacturer, and more about avoiding deliberate
| restrictions that prevent the community from extending a
| device's useful lifespan.
| GTP wrote:
| > Is there a difference between providing an "unlock code"
| upon deprecation, and requiring "support for every possible
| integration"(?)?
|
| As a different engineer than the one you where replying to,
| I can say that yes, there is a substantial difference
| between the two. What the original comment was likely
| referring to with unlock codes, is the ability of unlocking
| a smartphone's bootloader so that one is able to install
| custom ROMs. But this is very different from providing
| support for said ROMs. A company can totally say: "here's
| the unlock code, but you use this under your sole
| responsibility, we will void your warranty if you do this".
| Being able to install custom ROMs at the cost of losing the
| warranty is a compromise I'm willing to accept: one can
| still wait for the warranty to expire and then install
| custom ROMs.
| Teever wrote:
| Do the tech companies that make the devices that we now
| require for daily life because they decided to make the world
| that way release all of the resources necessary for
| independent people to do what you're suggesting?
|
| If not that's something that we need to regulate.
| enriquec wrote:
| The regulations stop more people from being able to do this
| than competition does. "because they decided to make the
| world that way" Who is "they"? Participants in the free
| market? I don't think inept politicians should supersede
| them.
| closewith wrote:
| The tech monopolies and oligopolies are not participants
| in a free market - they are they result of regulation.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Massive capital has the same effect.
|
| The world learned this circa-1900.
| closewith wrote:
| To be clear, I am in favour of regulation and taxation
| that would make these monopolies and their beneficial
| owners artefacts of the past.
|
| Neither the free market nor the current regulation in the
| US operates in favour of the citizenry.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| A useful big step would be to just use the exact
| antitrust regulations and laws we have had on the books
| since the first time we had to figure this out over a
| hundred years ago. Teddy Roosevelt helped take care of
| this, though we definitely didn't wield them against AT&T
| for too long.
|
| They served us okay enough right up until Reagan decided
| that monopolies would be fine if they "benefited the
| consumer", as if that isn't a trivially stupid concept to
| anyone who has dealt with any system ever. Thanks to
| Reagan's admin, we allowed companies to nakedly take
| aggressive control of any market they want as long as
| they pretended they wouldn't raise prices.
|
| We need to be less accepting of mergers and acquisitions
| too. If Google can just throw an absurd amount of money
| at any startup competitor to kill competition, it doesn't
| matter that it's not efficient, what human being will
| turn down $100 million just to stop competing?
| "Acquihires" are an anti-competitive practice
|
| A company just having a lot of cash on hand can purposely
| pervert markets if you let them.
|
| Conservatives complain about "punishing winners" but if
| you want a market to stay competitive, and therefore
| allow market forces to actually function, you cannot HAVE
| a "winner", or at least you can't let someone win so
| comprehensively that their resources end up warping the
| market just like a lot of mass warps spacetime. You must
| ensure that any company can be threatened by upstarts.
| graemep wrote:
| No one is asking for support for every possible integration.
|
| What people are asking for is not actively preventing other
| integrations. That means through business means and deals as
| well as technological measures.
| xxpor wrote:
| I gotta be honest, I really feel like these comments are
| completely divorced from reality.
|
| No one (p99.99) wants to get rid of Google/Apple on their
| phones. But "how do I install Play services" is a wildly
| popular search for people who own Kindle Fires.
|
| No one wants to deal with the Windows 98ificaiton of
| phones.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Nobody wants that because there's currently no market for
| it, so no solutions for it.
|
| (And yes, we can quibble about alternate Android app
| stores in countries that aren't China, but Google's
| rigged that game heavily in their favor via defaults)
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I know this requires changing the SoC to x86_64 or ARM
| but I want bog standard Linux _any distribution_ to run
| on the cell phone, at least run in the sense of the
| kernel. The applications would be up to the distribution
| maintainers. Talking to the modem should just be a Linux
| kernel module that has been blessed by Linus Torvalds.
| The code must be clean enough that at no point is he
| tempted to raise the middle finger or start writing an
| email. No obfuscated code, no lawful intercept JTAG
| debugging code, no dodgy BIOS just bog standard Linux and
| standard x86_64 or ARM hardware. Maybe something like
| coreboot as the BIOS.
|
| In fairness I also want a goose that lays golden eggs.
| pdimitar wrote:
| "What color do you like dragon to be?"
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Multi-Phasic Ultraviolet. Only visible with Spectrespecs.
| doug_durham wrote:
| By all means do that. I'm sure you will find an audience
| of enthusiasts who would consume your work. Saying is one
| thing, doing is another.
| Groxx wrote:
| They want it the moment they lose their Google account,
| or a service they used shuts down or sold to a group they
| don't want to support.
|
| They just know that complaining about it gets them
| nowhere, so you don't hear it much outside minor
| explosions of rage as they lose everything.
| crabbone wrote:
| You probably simply don't know what this is about. When
| Android phones "age" to a certain point, they become
| locked (user cannot log into the OS), and the only way to
| circumvent this is by jailbreaking them and installing a
| different firmware / OS.
|
| I have a Galaxy S7 that is in this condition, and I
| haven't the time to try to reinstall it.
|
| Many users never face this problem because they buy new
| phones before their old ones hit this particular point,
| often because many applications will stop working before
| that due to developers discontinuing support effectively
| rendering the phone useless. I ran into this problem
| because I kept my phone around due to some images stored
| on it (well, now that's lost forever).
| grayhatter wrote:
| > I gotta be honest, I really feel like these comments
| are completely divorced from reality.
|
| > No one (p99.99) wants to get rid of Google/Apple on
| their phones. But "how do I install Play services" is a
| wildly popular search for people who own Kindle Fires.
|
| Just like no one wants to get rid of Internet Explorer,
| right?
|
| No one wants to, in large part because it's a fucking
| nightmare. I say that as someone who not only knows how,
| but knows how to write the code for it too. Why is it so
| hard? What makes it a nightmare? Their business model
| requires a walled garden, because otherwise...
|
| Anyways, People have no issues migrating from myspace to
| facebook, or from youtube to instagram to tiktok. If it
| wasn't a fucking nightmare full of bullshit, user hostile
| rules (e.g. manifest version, or max age of TCP
| connections) there'd be a market for Google alternatives.
|
| Right now the only motivation is privacy, and Graphiene
| works pretty well. Turns out, caring about privacy is a
| lot more motivating than wanting some feahure to work.
| Especially when "they" have a vested interest in making
| sure no one else can provide that feature.
| jcoleh wrote:
| Could we apply a progressive tax to large corporations (like
| big tech monopolies) to force them to figure out what aspects
| of their own business should be split up and spun out to keep
| the size of companies roughly equal to "one layer of the
| stack".
|
| Seems like a progressive corporation tax would be an easy way
| to allow "the market" to naturally limit the size of
| corporations and find the correct separation points for
| separate businesses.
| ragebol wrote:
| Really random thought: the tax you pay on profit is
| proportional (or even 1:1) to your market share. Become a
| monopoly? 100% of your profit is now taxed.
|
| Nicer to stay at eg. 25% and have competition. Maybe ramp it
| exponentially
|
| (yes, I know there are loopholes in this pie-in-the-sky)
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| It's a creative thought. But how do you define "market",
| and _which market_ applies to which profit?
|
| Also, if you invent something so novel it makes a new
| market, that would imply you are immediately taxed at 100%.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's a good idea and a systemic nudge towards the outcome
| we want. (Probably minimum 3 large competitors in every
| market)
|
| Market definition should be tied to revenue source. It'd
| be difficult, but doesn't seem insurmountable.
|
| The Android/iPhone problem is somewhat of a unique case,
| given mobile's size. IMHO "unreasonable to non-
| monopolize" should be an option... but come with FRAND
| interconnection requirements as a consequence of
| designation (e.g. Android/iPhone both have to offer the
| ability for other apps stores to be implemented, and can
| only charge those stores FRAND fees)
|
| And novelty / new markets could be solved by
| progressively implementing the tax rate increases as the
| market matures (e.g. first 5 years).
| rexpop wrote:
| North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
| NAICS uses a hierarchical structure with sectors
| represented by 2-digit codes, such as Manufacturing
| (31-33) or Retail Trade (44-45).
|
| In antitrust law, a "market" is defined as an area of
| effective competition that includes both product (or
| service) and geographic dimensions. The US Department of
| Justice and Federal Trade Commission use market
| definitions to evaluate competition under laws like the
| Clayton Act.
|
| Tools like the hypothetical monopolist test are used to
| determine whether a market is too narrow by assessing if
| a monopolist could profitably raise prices.
|
| > Also, if you invent something so novel it makes a new
| market, that would imply you are immediately taxed at
| 100%.
|
| Fine, pick some fractional coefficient.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I'd be more inclined to scale it based on total revenue.
| There's a big difference between having 100% of a new
| market you just recently created that only makes $1M/year
| and having 90% of a decade-old market that makes
| $10B/year.
|
| (That said, there are a hundred other things that'd need
| fixing for such a hypothetical to be viable, let alone
| desirable. This was just the thing that stood out the
| most to me, particularly on a site centered around
| startups.)
| tomxor wrote:
| > Also, if you invent something so novel it makes a new
| market
|
| That's innovation, which is not the issue here. Creating
| new markets is usually win-win (initially), even with big
| tech leading the way.
|
| The more damaging issue is in taking over _existing_
| markets in ways that do _not_ benefit that market. e.g
| Big tech Moving into film and TV, it 's not simply a
| buyout with massive capital, it's about burning money in
| one ancillary market to benefit their primary market, but
| usually at a detriment to the ancillary one. They are
| unfairly leveraging their primary market position, tying
| products together, even if they don't ever make any
| profit in the movies, they create more and more lock-in
| with their platforms, making it harder and harder to not
| use them. The overall affect, more profit, without a
| chance of competition.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > That's innovation, which is not the issue here.
| Creating new markets is usually win-win
|
| You're preaching to the choir here. The post I was
| replying to described a policy that would have made that
| an issue, without some way of addressing that case.
| meekaaku wrote:
| Does this mean google should not do AI research, or enter
| into any AI related sector by leveraging its ad money? Or
| Meta?
|
| Should Microsoft have stayed with just BASIC compiler?
| Should it be illegal for it to enter operating systems
| market? What about productivity suite?
| fragmede wrote:
| Bundling is explicitly recognized as antitrust concern.
| Using a monopoly in one area to undercut a competitor is
| what Microsoft and Google were both found guilty of by
| the DoJ, so it's funny you should mention them. It's not
| about being prohibited from developing new products, but
| in how you price them, and giving away things for free
| because you can afford to due to your monopoly in one
| area, and your competitors can't is the crime, or forcing
| people to buy both of your products together at the same
| time, is the problem, as enforced by the DoJ. Google
| should be free to develop Chrome, but funding all of its
| development from advertising profit and then giving it
| away for free because you can because you have a monopoly
| in search advertising is the problem, because Mozilla
| doesn't have search advertising monopoly money or desktop
| operating system monopoly to be able to give their
| browser away for free and fund further development from
| those sales. This is why, as part of the Google breakup
| is for them to sell off Chrome.
| meekaaku wrote:
| This also means google should not give away for free any
| of their gmail service, youtube?, chrome, maps or any
| such thing. All of these are funded by the ad money
| keyringlight wrote:
| Depending on what you want to use it for, the device and the
| ROM is one aspect, but secondary to that is the online services
| and apps accepting your device. I think android ROMs are a
| dead-end now because of aspects like safetynet/play integrity,
| unless you put the work into countering/spoofing them a lot of
| the tasks people use phones for now such as
| online/accounts/payments require the device to appear
| untampered/modified for security purposes. I have my old 2018
| phone on android 14 via an unofficial lineage build because
| there was the freedom to do that, but I expect a bunch of apps
| will also make use of their freedom to deny me entry.
|
| If you're only using it for on-device tasks then you're
| probably fine, although at that point the benefits of updating
| a ROM are probably marginal
| Zak wrote:
| I haven't had to put much effort into keeping my Play
| Integrity bypass working. I might touch it once a year. I do
| fear the day Google starts actively fighting it.
| pbmonster wrote:
| I'm on grapheneOS on my daily driver, and that ROM officially
| passes basicIntegrity compliance without spoofing, but it
| lacks SafetyNet compliance (and fundamentally won't ever be
| able to get it officially) and the project refuses to
| fake/spoof it.
|
| This is enough for absolutely everything except Google
| Wallet/Pay.
|
| I'm fine with that.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| - "Why can't I swap cloud backends on the mobile platforms?"
| why would I make such system exist in the first place????
|
| no one can stopping you to create such system tbh, but
| expecting others to follow your ideologies is insane
|
| developing android and ios is come with a cost and they need to
| figure it out earn some of their money back and this is the
| "moat" that they have
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Right, which is why we should abolish the FDA, because
| forcing someone to follow my ideology of "stuff sold as
| medicine shouldn't kill me (99% of the time) if I follow the
| directions" is immoral.
|
| We should also abolish copyrights, because forcing companies
| to respect my IP is an ideological stance.
|
| Trademarks are gone too, because you can't force a company to
| not trample my trademark and abuse my brand position without
| forcing an ideology on them.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > Big tech has always driven me mad with how they leverage
| their monoplies once they reach a certain size.
|
| This book explains everything:
|
| https://store.hbr.org/product/information-rules-a-strategic-...
|
| I've never seen it in a library, but you can occasionally find
| used copies, if you don't want to buy a brand-new book that is
| a roadmap to doing things you disagree with.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Oh wow, those authors.
|
| For those not in the know, Carl Shapiro [1] and Hal Varian
| [2] are well known economics researchers. Hal Varian ended up
| working at Google building the AdWords auction after writing
| this it seems.
|
| For anyone wondering, there's this person called *Anna* that
| has an *archive* where the book can be found.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Shapiro
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Varian
| Gud wrote:
| If they were responsible for AdWords, they've had a net
| negative influence on the web.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Somebody was telling me how Hal Varian was "evil" the other
| night and I added that Vint Cerf was one of the people
| Upton Sinclair meant when he said "It is difficult to get a
| man to understand something, when his salary depends on his
| not understanding it." [1]
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-
| to-ge...
| jillyboel wrote:
| Are you referring to https://annas-archive.org/?
| clown_strike wrote:
| It goes to a login page but I was curious enough to pry.
|
| ISBN 087584863X or 9780875848631, "Information Rules" by Carl
| Shapiro. Available on the prominent alternative procurement
| network.
| echelon wrote:
| The real problem with these giant companies is that they can
| move into entirely new markets, eg. film production, and
| afford to lose massive amounts of money. They can effectively
| lose billions of dollars while gobbling up market share and
| starving the oxygen out of all the existing players in that
| market who need profits to sustain themselves.
|
| Amazon and Apple are undercutting Hollywood and losing money.
| They're subsidizing their Hollywood efforts with funds from
| unrelated business units (hardware, grocery stores, primary
| care doctors, etc.) You can get cheap (free) entertainment if
| you subscribe to Amazon Prime shipping, so why spend money on
| the competitor's product if entertainment is (at some gross
| sense and scale) fungible?
|
| The thing that needs to be broken up is the ability of these
| giants to subsidize moves into healthy existing markets or
| even nascent markets. They push out the incumbents with their
| massive cash hoards gained from unrelated business unit
| activity. They don't even try to profit at first until
| they've captured the market and suffocated the existing
| players.
|
| It's unfair that Amazon and Apple can make movies, buy out
| James Bond, Lord of the Rings, etc. off of their trillion
| dollar market caps, iPhones, and AWS profits. It's unfair
| that they can plaster free advertising on the side of their
| delivery vans or get free ad placement front and center in
| their App Store. That costs everyone else millions of dollars
| - a large percentage of the unit economics. Big tech has
| every advantage and is literally murdering entire markets
| with these insane, unfair advantages.
|
| These giant companies are like an invasive species. They're
| like lionfish moving into the Caribbean, killing all the
| local fauna. No natural predators. Complete decimation of the
| local ecology.
|
| Their behavior disconnects innovation, healthy and rational
| market monetization, and the actual rewards that should go to
| the investment and labor capital pioneering those areas.
| Institutional giants are snuffing out anything they see that
| they can expand into.
|
| Big companies need to be broken up for the sake of healthy
| markets and innovation. Big companies are gravitational
| singularities that distort everything.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| And also with their overvalued stock they can pay employees
| in stock and also buy competitors in stock. Amazon might
| not be that much better than Target or Walmart but the
| market prices them in much better.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| Over the years, I come across thought provoking comments
| from time to time on this platform. I usually take a moment
| to ponder what I just read. Then I ask myself who wrote
| this..? Then return to look at the username. More than once
| I find the name echelon. Echelon, you have a great mind and
| do a lot to further the HN commentary. Thank you.
| echelon wrote:
| Thank you so much for the kind words. There isn't a lot
| of that going around on today's internet with its
| ephemeral interactions, dopamine-driven engagement, and
| deep polarization. I too often allow this disposition to
| infect my own arguments and occasionally lean too heavily
| into emotion.
|
| I feel like this line of argument is gaining broader
| traction. When I was making these points four and five
| years ago I was frequently downvoted. I feel powerless to
| affect change, but I'm starting to notice that many
| powerful players seem to be echoing this sentiment. Tim
| Sweeney, Marc Andreessen, and now YCombinator.
|
| YCombinator hasn't had many centicorns lately, and the
| reason for that is that big tech is sucking out all of
| the oxygen in the room. You have to pay their tolls to
| play - discovery and distribution incredibly frictionful,
| and you're always in some manner paying the gatekeepers.
| They're bloodletting margin from the innovators and
| practitioners that need it the most.
|
| VC firms are certainly thinking this over. Google, Apple,
| and the rest put a ceiling over what portcos can
| ultimately grow up into, and they can even force M&A when
| in a different world that would be a subpar outcome.
| These firms and mid-cap tech companies can be a powerful
| voice to help shape regulation.
|
| I shouldn't even have to mention how this hurts the small
| business, lifestyle business, and mom and pop operations.
| Tech giants are finding every way to squeeze the lemon
| that they possibly can. If we can get enough of them
| talking about their pain points, that can be another set
| of voices to add to the angry cacophony.
|
| Europe has gotten louder in beating this drum, and I'm
| hoping the wave is starting to come to shore
| domestically. It'll make the world better for all players
| - even the tech giants.
|
| Google, as a sum of its parts, is frankly undervalued.
| They aren't properly monetizing all of their properties.
| If they were forced to break up and make each business
| unit anti-fragile, actually competitive, actually
| profitable, and wholly standalone, most of those business
| units would emerge stronger and better for customers.
| Shareholders would see benefit.
|
| But the broader impact to the health of the overall
| market is what's most important, and that could be
| tectonically massive. Everything and everyone who isn't
| "big tech" - every industry, every individual - has been
| ensnared in this Pacific garbage patch of netting. The
| once-free Internet has so many artificial barriers that
| you have to pay to bypass, platforms are walled gardens
| that don't play together, and the companies that own the
| gates aren't good stewards. Their role is just to accrue
| power and tax.
|
| Freeing the markets up again will make everyone
| collectively so much more innovative and profitable.
|
| I hope we see change soon.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| As a Googler I appreciate your Standard Oil view of the
| potential sub-businesses.
|
| As an engineer I dread having to do all the toil required
| to disentangle them, should that be the DOJ and USSC
| mandate.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > Thank you so much for the kind words. There isn't a lot
| of that going around on today's internet with its
| ephemeral interactions, dopamine-driven engagement, and
| deep polarization. I too often allow this disposition to
| infect my own arguments and occasionally lean too heavily
| into emotion.
|
| You're welcome, I too find my disposition infected from
| time to time.
|
| > VC firms are certainly thinking this over. Google,
| Apple, and the rest put a ceiling over what portcos can
| ultimately grow up into, and they can even force M&A when
| in a different world that would be a subpar outcome.
| These firms and mid-cap tech companies can be a powerful
| voice to help shape regulation.
|
| I'm skeptical that this will happen in an environment of
| deregulation. However, it is possible that we'll see
| change on a longer timeline.
|
| > Google, as a sum of its parts, is frankly undervalued.
| They aren't properly monetizing all of their properties.
|
| I couldn't agree more. Every time I see Google kill a
| product line, it bothers me that it wasn't spun off into
| its own company.
|
| > Freeing the markets up again will make everyone
| collectively so much more innovative and profitable.
|
| I'm not sure if I subscribe to the belief that markets
| were ever free. I do agree that we should do as much as
| we can to open them up though.
|
| > I hope we see change soon.
|
| Indeed, I simply hope we can see a return to reasoned
| discourse.
|
| Thank you again echelon. May the winds ever be to your
| back, the sun to your face, and free markets on your
| horizon.
| vunderba wrote:
| Over sufficient time, a corporation eventually hits a
| tipping point where it becomes more economically viable to
| starve out and/or buy out your competitors rather than to
| innovate, and then to further entrench one's monopoly
| through special interest lobbying groups with their massive
| capital reserves.
|
| Preventing the predictions of Marxists like Lenin around
| "Late Stage Capitalism" (disregarding the
| imperialist/colonialism overtones) from becoming a reality
| was supposed to be the job of trustbusting organizations
| like the FTC and DOJ but well... here we are.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| > Why can't I swap cloud backends on the mobile platforms?
|
| Not a mobile dev. Why can't you switch your backend from AWS to
| Azure or Hetzner?
| Sailemi wrote:
| They mean cloud backend as in switching one's cloud backup
| destination from iCloud to a competitor - e.g Onedrive. Not
| possible on iOS.
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| You maybe tilting at windmills. The problem is greed-oriented
| corporations will inevitably find the path of least resistance
| to more money against the interests of its workers, customers,
| and even the environment. Only worker-/user-owned co-op
| organizations have a real chance to break this cycle. We must
| stop feeding billionaires our time, our money, our labor, and
| our votes because they will never look out for us.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Wouldn't we loose specific features if a common cloud backup
| standard is developed ?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| No? Why would you. "Expandable" open standards are perfectly
| possible, though they do lead to some market fragmentation,
| but "market fragmentation" is just another name for "Product
| differentiation".
|
| Early in the 20th century, the telephone network was NOT an
| open standard. You had to ask AT&T to come to your home and
| wire a new telephone into THEIR network, and you weren't
| allowed to do anything else with that network. Opening that
| network up allowed us to build good modems (instead of
| relying on acoustic couplers which had abysmally low data
| rates due to bad quality coupling), build things like fax
| machines etc.
|
| Open standards with open networks is a _driving force_ to
| innovation. The internet is another one. We should be pushing
| very hard for basic rights to interact with networks and
| infrastructure.
|
| If the power companies had the kind of control that we've
| given """Tech"" businesses over their "networks", you
| wouldn't be allowed to plug anything "unapproved" by a
| business into the wall. Your local utility could literally
| extract a tax on any product that needed electricity.
|
| Open standards and laws that explicitly allow working in
| someone else's system for the purpose of Fair Use and
| interoperability are a requirement for continuous progress. A
| patent can encourage someone to make an initial investment
| into improvement, but the very moment they have any advantage
| the patent system means nobody else will be able to offer
| that kind of functionality for 20 years or so. Consider how
| long none of us were able to "Buy now" on any website other
| than amazon.com because of a stupid patent.
|
| The entire PC ecosystem only exists because the law says that
| there was a way you could, legally protected, interact with
| someone else's intellectual property. It doesn't have to be
| easy, just possible. Clean Room reverse engineering is an
| insane endeavor, but without it, IBM would have strangled PCs
| as a platform in the crib, because that would be more
| profitable a business than what we have now.
|
| If we want technological advancement and the ability to buy
| what you want, use what you want, do what you want with what
| you buy, then we need to forcefully wrest control away from
| these big companies who would really prefer to maintain
| tyrannical control over their "platforms" because it's just
| more profitable.
|
| Stuff like the Digital Markets Act does that.
| wilg wrote:
| > Why can't I swap cloud backends on the mobile platforms?
|
| The real answer is because this is a ton of work for very
| little customer benefit and creates tons of headaches to solve
| a mostly theoretical problem. It's not worth it to anyone
| involved.
| hbn wrote:
| Exactly, Apple will put in all the work to implement cloud
| features in a way where you can swap out the backend just so
| Hacker News Guy, as the "techie" guy in the family, can set
| up his whole family with his own hacked together cloud
| backend for their phones which will regularly fail and cause
| people to like their iPhone less, and/or support calls to
| Apple that will be 100x harder to troubleshoot.
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| Folks, let me tell you, our Big Tech is going to be absolutely
| massive--bigger and better than anybody's ever seen. We don't
| need Europe, okay? Their tech companies? Total losers. We're
| going to keep on winning--so much winning you're gonna say,
| "Please, Mr. President, enough with the winning!" But we won't
| stop. If we don't win the first time, we'll slap tariffs on them
| so fast their heads will spin. And if tariffs don't work, guess
| what? We'll just buy them out--it'll be huge. And if that doesn't
| do the trick... well, let's just say you really don't want to
| know what comes next. We're gonna win bigly, folks. Tremendous.
| lxe wrote:
| At this point we should not be supporting ANY legislation related
| to technology that's coming from the EU.
| notorandit wrote:
| Good luck. I fear it will be a waste of time and resources.
| zoobab wrote:
| DMA is cementing a duopoly in mobile OSes.
|
| Trop break that duopoly, we need rules for hardware manufacturers
| to store complete specifications in a trusted public registry,
| with fines if the doc is incomplete, misleading, etc...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-14 23:01 UTC)