alt Hacker NewsThis press release details terms which are both a) expressly forbidden in the Digital Rights Act, and b) which have been previously rejected by the Commission. To read now that the Commission approves of these terms is unbelievable to me. I rarely put on a tinfoil hat, but either the Commission has been paid off, or there are some geopolitical discussions we are not privy to. I can see no other explanation.
I have been following this legislation from the beginning. [My one and only submission to Hacker News was regarding exactly this.](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163704) I have followed progress judiciously. If the Commission agreed to these terms, there is something deeply troubling and sinnister about this. At minimum, these terms are hostile to customers, the market, and developers. Everyone loses here except Apple.
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Apparently they followed an "alternative" reading of the DMA concluding that unless you prove the fees or other obstacles would make alternative distribution commercially unviable or discriminatory, everything is just fine. Isn't it "interesting" how do many of these EU regulations always have these side doors that allow the very practices they promoted to adress?
I wonder if there's any statement on this from the Commission?
Not knowing anything detailed about the acts, which terms are you referring to? Notarization?
Current administration is strong arming europe in a lot of ways, and it has had impact on how EU Commission handles their own laws at the execution level for DMA, DSA, and probably even GDPR against American companies.
Rumor is that they EU Commission even has to work on the weekends, and it's not a joke.
I wouldn't be surprised if the reason the Commission agreed to it was better to have a shitty deal now, than to let Apple drag this through the courts for a decade.
The EU is notoriously bad at enforcing its laws, from GDPR to this.
I'd been saying "there's geopolitical/hidden reasons" for ages. The very first one for me was when Apple did that CSAM stunt. Fortunately the outrage was enough for them to peddle back, but it was such an out-of-left-field thing to do that I struggle to imagine 3 letter agencies weren't involved.
In this case (where Apple has power), my guess would be more along the lines of "Apple's found a lot of vulns and are ready to patch it; agencies offered a concession in exchange (and either arm twisted EU and/or gave them access to the same vulns)".
The funniest thing is there's no reason for any of this to be wrong. Individual parts have been public knowledge for a while, and putting them together doesn't take a lot of logic.
Fun reading, if you haven't read it already:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/apple...