yeah, I think for as much as many of us hold out hope that the EU will break the back of these brazen monopolists, there's a limit to their friendliness to the actual interests of consumer freedom when it's got to be balanced by their love of censorship.
replyWhatever censorship exists in the EU is really inconsequential. What bothers me is the spying.
replyDo you mean “censorship by the EU” or “censorship within the EU”, or both? Because I see a lot of the latter, and I don’t find it inconsequential at all.
replyBy the EU and in Germany, really... What is censored in other member states isn't in the news, but for all I know it's also not much and not important.
replyWhich censorship do you consider problematic?
The whole EU censorship rhetoric is almost always devoid of facts and examples. I feel like it is mainly sustained because US people like the narrative that theytl are the free(TM).
replyAsking innocent questions often works better than confrontation, but yeah, this elevated importance of utmost free speech doesn't survive the Atlantic crossing and can be used to maliciously pooh-pooh Europe to an American audience.
replyWe don't have a lot of "censorship within the EU", some russian propaganda tv channels might be blocked (as they should) but that's about it really. Now if you mean in a particular EU member, that's different but it's not impacting the whole EU.
replyWait, which apps are you referring to having been delisted by EU (which branch? what process?), as opposed to "breaching app store terms and conditions" (which the companies do of their own initiative all the time)
replyOne example: Russia Today / RT News. Process: Google made a blog post [1] and cited EU's Council Regulation (EU) 2022/350.
replyThe app is still available in Russia on both App Store and Play Store.
[1] https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...
The Play Store is not required for APK distribution. Not now, nor has it ever been.
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is like much of the discourse around the changes, overly sensationalized and borderline false.
replyThe only change made that's relevant to sideloading-a-downloaded-APK as far I understand, is a 24hour delay in enabling the ability to do so, which is a wildly overblown non-issue.
It is less secure though, and they are doing it in the name of security. People are right to call that out as bullshit.
replyAvailability is a key component of security, and this is a 24-hour DOS on apps not blessed by google.
It’s a one time delay that occurs when you first enable the ability to install downloaded apks and you never see it again for any device attached to your Google account. That’s why I called it a wildly overblown non-issue
replyI call hat freedom gone with one switch
replyThey’ve announced they’re changing the policy to require ‘verification’ in future Android versions.
replyIt will likely be delayed, just like Manifest v3, but eventually it will happen.
Well, they seem to have started shipping parts of that; recently I noticed https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... was installed for me.
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