What happens when Meta, X, Google et al. move to their own stores where they distribute apps unencumbered by Apple's privacy policies? Your relatives then contact you and insist that you flip the switch for them so they can install Facebook and Instagram from the Meta store so they can continue scrolling cat memes.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument (from multi-store proponents) about how to prevent this. If the big social media companies pull their apps from Apple's official store and move to their own stores (with unfettered access to spy on users) then they will be successful at dragging their users with them. Furthermore, there is no evidence that GDPR has had any success stopping them from siphoning up all the data they want.
You tell them to use the service's web page because their app isn't available from a trustworthy source. And if their web page sucks, you encourage them to use a competing service whenever possible and only use the inconvenient one when strictly necessary. Which, as others do the same, pressures the service to do what you want and put their app in the existing store.
This is the same thing that Apple does if they refuse to follow the process as it is, right? You're being insufficiently stubborn. And excessively dismissive if you think users making choices have no power. There are demonstrably people committed to having it their way:
Unless you think tech companies have gotten too big and people don't have a choice anymore. If you have a monopoly, what you want is not another monopoly to fight them over which gets to fleece you, it's to smash them both by any available means. One of which is resistance through personal choices, one of which is... anti-trust enforcement.
Users don't have much power, individually. They express their power collectively through the political system. I'm just very skeptical of the approach taken by Europe with the DMA. It seems to be less about empowering individual users and more about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices.
> about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices
Do you not believe that increasing competition for app stores will "empower individual users"? If yes, please provide an alternative to DMA that will benefits users more.
Apple markets their offering on its privacy and security. In effect, they act as a bargaining agent on behalf of their users which says no to a lot of the tracking Google, Meta, et al. want to do. Due to Apple's marketshare and the nature of this arrangement (the walled garden), these trackers are forced to bargain with Apple as a unit. The DMA seeks to put an end to this arrangement and allow the trackers to bargain with users individually.
So, to answer your question: no, I do not believe it will empower individual users. If we really want to empower individual users we should be looking to inject more competition into the social media markets as well. More "app stores" that do nothing but offer the same apps while bypassing Apple's protections will not benefit users. And if the 30% Apple tax is the real problem then why not legislate against that directly?
> If we really want to empower individual users we should be looking to inject more competition into the social media markets as well.
Sure, but you can do both.
> More "app stores" that do nothing but offer the same apps while bypassing Apple's protections will not benefit users.
It's not just the same apps though. For example, the license Apple uses for the app store is incompatible with the GPL, so no one can make an iPhone app under the GPL or use existing GPL code in one. That license is one of the things that allows collaborative projects to form and right now that can't happen for iPhones.
Likewise, the $100/year fee deters hobbyists from creating apps.
And Apple prohibits certain types of content in their store, e.g. adult content or P2P apps, which some users would want.
> And if the 30% Apple tax is the real problem then why not legislate against that directly?
Price controls are generally a bad idea. The cost of hosting the app installers is generally negligible, but a few apps could be huge, and then it isn't, so how much should it cost? Can they charge a flat percentage of sales or does it have to be per-GB of transfer? What happens when the market price of storage or bandwidth changes over time? What if it's different in different regions?
Legislating rules to handle all the edge cases is a fool's errand when competition would handle it for you because anyone who charges too much would lose business to someone who charges less.
Users have a lot of power individually. The most obvious example is when there is competition. You could be a single person and your counterparty could be the world's largest corporation, but if you have ten other viable alternatives, they can do no worse to you than the best of your other alternatives or you just choose the other one.
But you can also do it by being stubborn. Some people seem to have completely forgotten how to do this. There is a transaction with a surplus of $100, the counterparty is some egregious monopolist and the deal they offer you is that they get $99 and you get $1. A lot of people take the deal, because $1 is better than nothing, but that's not it. What you do is flip over the table and walk away, because that costs you $1 but it costs them $99 (or $50 or whatever their share would be after offering whatever it would have taken to satisfy your sense of fairness).
People are so lazy now, or they've been conditioned, so now they always just take the $1 even if the alternative is only a minor inconvenience for them. Okay, you have to use Signal instead of WhatsApp, so what? But being willing to walk away from an unfair offer can sometimes be to your advantage even in an individual negotiation, because you both know the other party has more to lose. It's definitely to your advantage when other similarly-situated people do the same thing at scale. See also:
> They express their power collectively through the political system.
They express their power collectively however they want. Organizations (e.g. FSF, EFF) can do things like pool money to create competing systems. Even for-profit corporations can do this -- you don't like the incumbent? Start a competitor, and raise funding from all the other people who don't like the incumbent.
But again this seems like something people have been conditioned to believe doesn't work, even though it obviously does. To take a simple example, the EFF created Let's Encrypt, which cut the legs out from under the certificate mafia and made TLS free for everybody. All it took was an organization to pool enough resources to develop the initial implementation.
> I'm just very skeptical of the approach taken by Europe with the DMA. It seems to be less about empowering individual users and more about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices.
Government regulations often fail as a result of incompetent administration or some corruption. But some forms of anti-trust can only be fixed through the law because the trusts themselves were created that way.
If government enforce contracts in restraint of trade then people will enter into contracts and form a cartel or enforce a monopoly. That is not acceptable, so then governments have to constrain what kinds of contracts they're willing to enforce, and somebody has to write down what "restraint of trade" means to establish how that works. It's not fun and they'll often get it wrong but the only alternatives are to either not have governments enforce contracts or allow cartels to form that become de facto private governments. So we do the best we can.
The EU is not great at this, but the problem they're trying to address is real, so sometimes you just get to sit back and watch two entities you don't really like have a fight with each other.
Except that Signal is free and nothing prevents anyone from having both installed at once, so you being stubborn can get your contacts to install the free app that takes two seconds to install.
Then everyone ends up on Signal because anyone can install Signal but the stubborn people refuse to install WhatsApp, at which point "everyone you actually need to communicate to is on Signal, WhatsApp is pretty much useless."
But in order to get there, you (the collective you, the median pedant) have to be more stubborn than the people who want to use WhatsApp, instead of the other way around.
Most casual contacts aren't going to install Signal just for you, no matter how stubborn you are. They'll just shrug and go their way.
I've been there, actually running Signal as my primary IM for several years. The number of people I "converted" who stuck around was, in the long run, zero.
>What happens when Meta, X, Google et al. move to their own stores where they distribute apps unencumbered by Apple's privacy policies?
I guess pigs fly or hell freezes over. Musk and Zuckerburg had years after such changes to make their own store on Android (which put in similar privacy policies at the same time as Apple). It doesn't make any sense for them because being off the main store is worse than gleeming off a bit more data to sell.
>I have yet to hear a convincing argument (from multi-store proponents) about how to prevent this.
How about proving that the subjects in question are on multiple stores to begin with, or otherwise have shown interest?
You're questioning GDPR's validity, but your own premise isn't a thing to begin with.
Why should that be prevented exactly? Why shouldn’t users be able to download apps directly from companies if they want to? Isn’t the whole point of the EU legislation to make all this possible?
> Your relatives then contact you and insist that you flip the switch for them so they can install Facebook and Instagram from the Meta store so they can continue scrolling cat memes.
You should not have to police adults on what they're allowed to do with their property. If someone asks me to help them setup their computer, I may gave some advice and warning about things to avoid. If they asked me to do something that may be dangerous, I can refuse to do it, but I will not actively prevent them from doing so. They're not children.
If someone is ok with putting their whole digital life at risk, then let him do so. Just like you can't prevent someone who wants to eat cake all day. It's not your life.
> You should not have to police adults on what they're allowed to do with their property.
The fundamental problem with this "power to the people" mentality is that adults don't actually know how to use technology. The average person is technologically illiterate.
You can go on about giving adults full control over their property, etc. etc. but we both know that this is how you get security disasters: old people getting scammed, people losing their life savings and what not.
Part of being an effective security engineer, is realizing that you need to protect people themselves. 2FA is a prime example of security driven via this mindset: necessary because the technologically illiterate masses reuse passwords. There are other benefits, but that's the main reason.
So you shouldn't have to police people, but practically, in the end you do.
> If someone is ok with putting their whole digital life at risk, then let him do so.
All fun and games until people lose their life savings and get forced into homelessness or whatever.
Then these people start to blame you. Then technologically illiterate senators and regulators will also blame you. Lose-lose scenario.
Crypto is a prime example of what happens when you give people control. "Power to the people!," tons of people get scammed, and this prompts regulatory lockdown.
TL;DR is that the EU regs wouldn't be a problem if Apple could hide the functionality behind developer settings, but they can't. Exciting times, people in the EU are gonna get totally fucked by shady apps. GG.
> You can go on about giving adults full control over their property, etc. etc. but we both know that this is how you get security disasters: old people getting scammed, people losing their life savings and what not.
This happens when senile people are legally authorized to exercise control over their assets. It has nothing to do with technology and has been happening since before computers existed. The general solution is to appoint a conservator who is required to authorize major transactions.
Which hardly justifies using the same measures for someone of sound mind.
> 2FA is a prime example of security driven via this mindset: necessary because the technologically illiterate masses reuse passwords.
And then their phone number changes or they lose access to their email and you've locked them out of their account.
This is particularly egregious when the second factor is required to be a phone number, because people in financial straits will have their service canceled for non-payment and now you've magnified their problems at the worst possible time. But phone numbers serve as a convenient tracking ID since most people only have one of them, which may explain the popularity of requiring them "for your own protection".
> All fun and games until people lose their life savings and get forced into homelessness or whatever.
We build insecure systems and then blame the users for it and offer to lock them in a cell to protect them from our bad choices.
Why is it that anyone can charge a credit card or a bank account who has the account number? Public key cryptography has been a thing for decades. Put a USB-C connector on the credit card itself and require the card to be plugged in to the device the first time each merchant wants to charge the account. 99% of credit card fraud, gone, because you can't breach one merchant and use the card info at a different one without physical access to the card.
Meanwhile anyone could trivially cancel a subscription because the list of authorized merchants would be listed on the bank's account webpage and the user could remove one at any time.
> Crypto is a prime example of what happens when you give people control.
Anybody can go to the bank, right now, and withdraw cash and hand it to a scammer. Sometimes they do. You can also give them your television or company ID badge. Cryptocurrency is no different. Most of the crypto scams are get rich quick schemes, which people have been getting scammed by since the invention of barter.
What made cryptocurrency so susceptible to scams wasn't that people were in control, it was that some people were actually getting rich, which made others credulous, and that attracts con men.
"We have to protect people from themselves" is only true for small children and the mentally ill. Adults get to make their own choices -- because there is no one else to make them. As soon as you appoint someone else to do it, that person has a conflict of interest and the incentive to defect, and the person affected needs the right to choose differently unless you can prove that this specific person is mentally incapable of exercising reason.
"Nobody is ever completely reasonable" doesn't cut it because that applies to the gatekeepers too.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument (from multi-store proponents) about how to prevent this. If the big social media companies pull their apps from Apple's official store and move to their own stores (with unfettered access to spy on users) then they will be successful at dragging their users with them. Furthermore, there is no evidence that GDPR has had any success stopping them from siphoning up all the data they want.