* Chat control is toothless if users can simply side-load an app without snooping.
* The EU companies who successfully lobbied for regulations against Apple now see that the 15% tax is worth it when they can A/B test the counterfactual. So those companies no longer care if Google will do the same thing.
* The EU is now in an awkward position that it is ok for a newspaper to sell your personal info via pay-or-consent, but not for a social network to do it. Some will keep yammering on about "gatekeepers", but it's sort of an emperor has no clothes moment.
* Declaring that iPadOs is a gatekeeper (after it failed to meet the quantitative criteria for such) was another such emperor has not clothes moment. The whole "gatekeeper" narrative has turned into a farce.
* The people commenting on this forum are not even a rounding error in the EU electorate.
> It's not reasonable to expect consumers to figure out if the meat they buy is tainted, just as it's not to figure out if their phone spies on them, manipulates information, or sells their data (especially when there's a duopoly).
Indeed! Neither would it be reasonable for the sellers of meat to demand anonymity! If one sells tainted meat, he should be held accountable! We should identify him!
Yet, the creators and sellers of software for a General Purpose Computer (remember, that is the argument why phones should be regulated) demand that they should be above the law, anonymous and unaccountable!
Schrodinger's computing device: The one which is so vital to everyday life that we must not prohibit the user to run whatever software he likes, yet so unimportant that we have not a care in the world to identify any fraudster who might wish to distribute software.
IMHO governments are partially behind those initiatives so they are unlikely to regulate themself- reason in last few years they intensified work on Digital ID, Age Verification, Chat control, KYC, etc.
One thing EU loves is regulation though, so I expect they will introduce preemptive regulations to enforce strict ID verification as well as regulations to fine big companies for breaching user privacy with strict ID verification policies.
AIUI, they have told Google to find a fix, or else.
I been living in SE Asia for few years each in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and really didn't notice that this is supposed to be like major political problem.
'Fraud' is the same smoke screen and excuse as 'protect the children from social media or pedophiles'.
Do you see how quickly that argument can be flipped to support what google is doing here? Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if half the reason to to lock down phones is because governments keep pressuring them to do so.
The EU Commission is currently pushing the shitty EU Identity Wallet for mandatory age verification, and it requires GooglePlay Services to be installed for "anti-tampering". That also means a ban on non official versions of Android like LineageOS and GrapheneOS.
And Google thinks it can pull this ridiculous stunt.
Most people are too non-technical to understand why this is a bad thing even when it's explained to them. Plus, whatever administration is in power in the US has a lot of influence.
Trump has already said that he wouldn't tolerate regulation that affects American companies [1], painting regulation that happens in another country as something that will affect US citizens. (I mean if you use the GDPR as an example, it's not wrong. Think of cookie pop ups while browsing the web in the US)
I would like the the EU would go harder with their regulations, because it usually results in other countries or states following their lead, but I dont see that happening. Regulation has been painted as "bad", and we have at least 3 more years until that changes.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/12/tech/us-eu-tech-regulation-fi...
This lays bare the stupidity of applying the pay-or-consent law to only Facebook and not everyone. Every important newspaper in Europe has pay-or-consent. It does not matter that each one individually is smaller, the effect is the same.
The law was carefully crafted to ensure European businesses (newspapers) are not "gatekeepers" while ensuring American businesses (social networks) are. That fact did not go unnoticed in the rest of the world.