I wonder how all those European companies are doing it. They ship everything all the time, avoid the $billions fines, yet make mistakes like everybody else.
> how much the EU slowed down innovation
You say this all the time, yet we're doing fine. How come?
> I wonder how all those European companies are doing it.
Carefully crafted/gerrymandered laws that only rent seek from American big tech.
> You say this all the time, yet we're doing fine. How come?
You're not doing fine. I don't know how you can look back at the stagnation of the past two decades in the EU and think you're "doing fine." One of our companies is worth more than your entire tech industry. Your engineers get paid a fifth of what they could make here, so they often move here. In tech, you've fallen so far behind others superpowers that it's not even funny, and you're gleefully positioning yourself to fall even further behind. Your relative share of the global GDP is dropping.
You think you're doing fine, but if the EU doesn't plan on amending the regulatory-industrial complex that has caused its undeniable stagnation, it will eventually fall into irrelevancy, and be on the losing side of the rising global wealth inequality.
> Carefully crafted/gerrymandered laws that only rent seek from American big tech.
Alright then; who else should have been covered with the DMA in your opinion? Which other companies created unfair tax arrangements that have avoided scrutiny for decades?
Oh, nobody as large as Apple? Huh. Sounds like they're not targeting American companies at all, but instead prioritizing the biggest violators.
Maybe if a lot of you in big tech hadn't misused our personal data and sold it to the highest bidders, or hadn't stiffled small tech innovations through monopoly, the EU wouldn't need to regulate you so hard.
Bingo. People on this website love Apple products so much that they can't see past their own materialism to admit Apple is a bad business. It's fine to like Jony Ive's designs; fact of the matter is that Tim Cook is preventing innovation with his business decisions. Apple users are being segregated from novel and useful software because the first-party distributor gets cold feet thinking about it.
I guess they'll get their rude awakening someday. If xvectors comments here are any indication, it seems like they're starting to get out of the proverbial bed at least.
This is quite an exaggeration. Afaik there has been only a single GDPR fine over 1 billion € (Meta) and for some reason Apple seems to manage just fine (with GDPR).
> for some reason Apple seems to manage just fine (with GDPR).
Just fine?
Like the EU forcing Apple to pay $14B in back taxes after voiding a legal and consensual tax agreement between Apple and Ireland? [1]
Or the DMA resulting in an absurd $2B fine related to music streaming, in a transparent attempt to prop up Spotify (the dominant market leader in this space)?
Both of these in the last couple of months alone? It's just rent-seeking with a pretend "we're doing it for the good of the people" facade.
> Like the EU forcing Apple to pay $14B in back taxes after voiding a legal and consensual tax agreement between Apple and Ireland?
They're back taxes. The EU did right by every single law-abiding business when they forced Apple to remediate their unnatural and unfair arrangement. Not a single naturally competitive business suffered as a result of either action. The EU does not suffer economically by weeding out businesses that exploit it to avoid paying taxes, only Apple does.
A company and a country made a legal, consensual agreement (that the Irish public was also in favor of) and the EU stepped in and "re-interpreted" it to rent-seek.
This is transparent and obvious to everyone outside of the EU. Rent-seeking behavior is the reason companies are less interested in going to the EU.
> The EU does not suffer economically [...]
The EU suffers economically when it falls behind technologically.
The company was trying to rent-seek by profiting off access to markets and infrastructure supported by the public without paying their fair share of it, and achieve unfair competitive advantage against equivalent companies by violating EU regulations.
>The EU suffers economically when it falls behind technologically.
Is moving faster better? Certainly to generate wealth for a subset of the population but rarely for the general public.
This view that the US is doing better because a small group of rich people are increasing their share of the wealth while most of the country is at best treading water or worse seeing their economic power decrease, where the average person in the EU is actually better off is myopic at best and malicious at worse.
> and the EU stepped in and "re-interpreted" it to rent-seek.
No, they overrode the Irish decision because it was illegally anticompetitive. Please stop using Hacker News if your intention is to solely be butthurt over unfair rulings when they get corrected. Everyone on this website knows that Apple wields illegal anticompetitive power, nobody here should be surprised when Apple is forced to remediate tax fraud and deliberate DMA violations.
> The EU suffers economically when it falls behind technologically.
Well then it's a good thing Apple isn't leading the industry.
"Noooooo! Think of how many Vision Pro sales that Apple would miss out on by pulling out of Europe!" ...said nobody ever.
If this slop is what you consider a revolution, I dread to see what else the SV visionaries come up with next. Perhaps some iris scans in exchange for fake digital currency? Oh wait, Mr Worldcoin Altman already got us covered there!
