Oh come on. Apple doesn't want to give up control. That's what this is about. The privacy thing is just to make them look good
The DMA mandates that Apple allows for competition, which (if you believe in capitalism) is good for the market overall. It's essential to stop big tech from abusing their market dominance. However Apple would prefer to not allow competition for their digital products on any of their hardware.
Apple wants to implement features that access data locally. It doesn’t want to allow competition for offering those features, but if it did, competitors may use that access to local data to exfiltrate.
So it is about both competition and, as a result of creating competition, privacy.
This allows competition, but also allows privacy for those who want it. See? Simple really, but Apple being Apple dont want to let 3rd parties use its AI APIs and so we have this standoff.
If you want to you could still use Apple or another provider you decide to trust - or even one that does everything locally. The competition would still have to follow GDPR after all.
Will the EU enforce the same for 3rd party integrations?
If Apple extended that philosophy to other vendors then yeah, it would be deliberately unfair and anticompetitive.
Even if you could make all the other possible vendors run private cloud compute style stuff that would be a lot to manage.
And I can’t imagine the EU would like, and as a user I would certainly hate, the “OK you can use Grok but you lose all privacy too bad“ dialogue box they could make.
Most sysadmins know that hash matching only mitigates a small subset of rare upstream attacks. Apple could still be MITMing the whole thing (SSL added and removed here :)) and no auditor would get the chance to check. The offered audit is so weak that I would not trust any FAANG business to administrate it.
Apple is once again demanding arbitrary centralization to give them an undeserved veto power. None of this is for security.
Just have an open house for anyone interested to come poke the hardware and software?
While I can appreciate the reason for the DMA, people don't have to buy Apple devices, they can buy any type of phone they want and just use the ecosystems provided by these phones.
Apple is free to do what they want. The EU can go and try and build their own iPhone (good luck with that).
Do you really? The only two types of operating systems for phones that you could reasonably use are iOS and Android. So it's either Apple or Google.
Imagine a world, in which you could only consume Apple or Google services on those phones. No more Netflix or Disney+ on iPhones - only Apple TV Plus because the streaming video API is not available to third party apps. I think there are plenty of other examples to demonstrate the point.
A free market doesn't work if you have a duopoly. A free market requires the freedom to choose between different services, which Apple is trying to limit by only allowing Siri AI to access specific OS interfaces.
Not sure why some people on hackernews support more locked down operating system.
Apple came out of nowhere and invented the smartphone because the existing system was controlled by the telcos and horrible phone technology. The same thing can easily happen again.
It makes no sense to limit Netflix on phones and people would probably stop buying iPhones.
If the EU wants an "open" phone ecosystem, they should foster real innovation in their space and build it themselves.
Furthermore, if we lived in a world where the two main OS's were locked down to an insane degree, we would also have plenty of alternative operating systems. The reason we don't today is because we don't really have a need for it, in the same way linux has a monopoly on servers and nobody really cares.
Those make up 0% of the market [1], which classifies Apple and Google as gatekeepers.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe/
If you have a market with a handful of companies producing good products, and a handful of companies producing shit products nobody wants or buys, you cannot claim that the companies producing the good products are "gatekeeping", and that's the reason why nobody buys the shit products.
It doesn't matter how they became gatekeepers.
Sure - the DMA has nothing to do with privacy though, so that's a straw man. or is it a red herring? I always get those confused.
To follow along that line of thoughts, the requirements they are actually asking for proper DMA compliance would probably go right in that direction tbh.
I, for one, am happy Apple is taking a stance, and, as an European would really much like my government to stop asking ridiculous things that do not profit the consumer.
They already claim to care about your freedom and privacy. Now they can prove it.
Seriously EU folks need to come to down to earth sometime.