IIUC this is a deliberate act of aggression by Apple - which is important to note. Apple already has regional accounts, so the infrastructure for this is in place already, for preexisting reasons. My Apple ID is still within US after months of being in the EU. They have not “kicked me out” yet.
There’s no other way than to interpret this, and the preceding actions by Apple, as a temper tantrum of malicious compliance. That begs a whole new set of questions.
Optically, this is the behavior you’d expect from companies that stopped innovating and are clinging onto power with the power of lawyers. It seems like an incredibly small hill to sacrifice your reputation on.
Are their long term ambitions to live off the 30% cut? Because it sure as hell appears like they’re fighting an existential battle, which doesn’t inspire confidence in their visionary leadership. Perhaps the best thing for Apple is to take away their comfort blanket, so they’re setting sights on innovation again.
>[...]this is a deliberate act of aggression by Apple [...]
>There’s no other way than to interpret this, and the preceding actions by Apple, as a temper tantrum of malicious compliance [...]
While it's pretty clear that most people here would have liked it if Apple rolled out third party app stores to everyone and were hoping that EU regulations would extend to non-EU users (like with USB-C charging port standard), the reality of the situation is that EU jurisdiction ends at EU borders. Apple is complying with the laws exactly, and characterizing it as "aggression" or "temper tantrum" is closer to name calling than any sort of cogent argument. Chinese regulations require Apple to store iCloud data in Chinese data centers. Apple complies with this for only Chinese users. Should this also be characterized as "aggression" or "temper tantrum"? What's the difference between these two cases beyond "I like third party app stores" and "I hate my data stored in the hands of an authoritarian regime"?
i travel a lot. and that means, i sometimes leave my home for months at a time. more than 30 days.
when roaming with a chinese sim card, all my traffic keeps going through china, regardless how long i leave the country. so for practical purposes, it is like i never left the country.
but if i use an EU sim, suddenly after 30 days i am no longer considered to be part of the EU? as an EU citizen? how does that make any sense?
EU laws should apply as long as i use a EU sim card, regardless how long i am outside of the country. only when i switch sims, then i find it acceptable to say that EU law should no longer apply to my phone.
What belies this is the fact that they do this differently for the specific intersection of the EU and the app store than they do for any of the many other long standing geofenced functions.
Exactly. They’re following the DMA to a T and because people don’t like that fact, all kinds of loaded language is used to describe the mere act of complying with a law.
They might as well call Apple petty for not throwing in an iPhone with the purchase of a MacBook.
"This just in: Legal scholar points out that they are not technically touching the cookie jar."
It's trivial to invalidate this non-argument and expose intent, or rather remove the cloak of denyability, by simply witnessing several different inconsistencies.
Not merely that such geofenced functions are nothing new, and so there is already a practically infinite body of evidense of established behavior around that, and somehow only this one thing is handled differently, but also other things like someone else pointed out, are Apple still accepting their EU payment method? Applying EU taxes on those transactions? Conforming to EU laws in other ways relating to that customer? In all other ways Apple are declaring that they recognize the user as an EU citizen.
Apparently, it's not trivial enough for you to succeed in invalidating it.
“Aggression,” “malicious compliance,” and other such loaded terms in this context are, by their nature, subjective opinions, and opinions will never be substantive enough to refute an argument.
My paying a fine because the law says so, but doing it begrudgingly and not paying a cent more doesn’t make me “aggressive” or “complying maliciously”; it’s just me complying with the law.
I get it; you want your boogie, man, and you’re welcome to have it. But I’m welcome to point out that it doesn’t have any objective merit or value other than to soothe whatever feeling you have that compels you to broadcast it in the first place.
You bringing up VAT settlement betrays how in over your head you are. Not only have you embraced an extremely thorny topic by doing so, but it actively undermines the argument you’re trying to make, making your case all the less credible.
The tax subject is ultimately liable for VAT settlement. But because governments understand that it’s tough to enforce it on an individual level, they prescribe a set of practices for merchants that are, in principle, based on many assumptions. Some governments are more zealous in this than others, closing more possible enforcement loopholes than others; nevertheless, they all prescribe practices.
These assumptions mainly revolve around the country of origin and country of destination of goods and services, customer status and their nexus, and value of the goods and services.
An excellent example is if I, an EU citizen living in the US, visit my home country and purchase goods I intend to take home, then the merchant has to assume I’m subject to VAT and thus will charge me VAT. But when I depart, I can get the VAT back at the tax office at the airport.
Similarly, when I made purchases in my home country for my business when I still lived there, merchants specializing in B2B sales were allowed to sell me the goods without levying VAT on behalf of the government. Others who didn’t specialize in B2B and didn’t have the administrative logistics to handle B2B sales would levy the VAT, and I could then get it back from the government.
Sales tax settlement in the US also falls upon the tax subject, even though there are some fundamental differences between VAT and sales tax. On my tax return, I need to declare any purchases made out of state, and legally, I owe use tax if I purchased goods out of state tax for goods to be used at home.
Simply put, how Apple levies VAT for EU member states has little to do with what Apple wants and everything to do with what the law prescribes on how to treat users. Especially considering Apple acts as an intermediary in the majority of the cases and doesn’t levy VAT on behalf of their own but on behalf of other developers, which is another thorny dimension to this topic. As such, it’s entirely plausible that Apple levies VAT on users in certain situations who don’t owe it and who can ask for a VAT refund.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that it’s very plausible that if it were up to Apple, they wouldn’t levy any VAT because prices in VAT countries show the total after VAT price. It inherently makes it more likely that a sale occurs when that number is lower. They’re just not given much choice in the matter.
In contrast, the DMA provides an obvious provision on who the DMA does or doesn’t apply to. Reasonable minds can differ on how to read a minor part of that provision, but as far as legal language goes, this is about as clear as it gets.
Are they continuing to accept your EU payment method after 30 days? Then they're still doing business with you in the EU and the DMA should still apply.
If I vacation in the US and use my EU payment method to pay for a coffee in the US, am I doing business in the US or in the EU?
How do you think the tax nexus plays out in that case?
Do you think the coffee shop owes income or sales tax to the country where the bank issuing my payment method is established? What if I am from EU country A but my bank is located in EU country B? Is A or B going to claim nexus?
I think there’s no need to be coy here because we both know that that merchant isn’t going to have to pay a dime to a government entity outside of the US and neither would I in this example, at least not insofar it is related to my purchase of the coffee.
That's a poor comparison because Apple isn't a local business. They're everywhere.
And to the extent that they act as if they were localized, they continue to treat EU customers as if they were in the EU until the customer chooses to change region. Selling to them through the EU app store, charging EU prices, with EU policies.
EU law applies to Apple or its subsidiaries operating in Europe. As long as Apple itself stays within EU borders, the law applies to them. It stops applying to them when they exit the EU market. The third parties (including EU citizens) mentioned within the text of the regulation do not define the applicability of the law itself.
It’s malicious because they’ve done more work than necessary to put limitations on the user.
They already know what region an account is in. If they just said “Ok, EU account, turn on the flags” that would be less engineering effort. Even if they increased verification of things like where you actually are relative your account at signup. But this is them engineering this solution to make sure the secret sauce doesn’t leak out of the EU. Everyone knows it’s malicious because it’s easy to intuitively grasp that they’ve gone through all this extra effort to make absolutely sure everyone outside of the EU has a worse experience no matter what
on the other hand.. apple is against third-party stores..
they do not want then, so they will only make then available were they are forced to..
only place they are forced to is EU, so they made sure the third-party stores only work on the places that they are required by law..
if apple had any say in this there would be no third-party stores anywhere..]
this is completely the opposite of other geo-fenced functions that apple want tom make available but cant because some reason or another, usually local laws.
like the ECG on the apple watch.. they did not had it available everywhere, but if you enabled the function in a country that allowed it to be enabled you could keep using in other countries that did not had it available yet because the law in those countries did not forced then to disable it. but there were countries where you could not enable it even if your watch supported.
same thing here but the other way around.. apple will enable third-party store only where they have to and disable everywhere else.. they could keep then enable when you leave but they do not want to, hell they do not want third-party stores at all even in EU, they only have it there because EU law forced then to have it..
Yep, I think this is a pretty clear-cut case of a "fuck you", they should be punished accordingly. By the EU inside the EU of course. Or just disallow this outright, which would require an Apple-specific law and all of the resources that brings in though, jeez.
They included an example fact that exposes how the current actions are different from equivalent long preexisting behavior, and so that difference does require an explanation.
It sounds like someone in Apple is burning the corporate brand to make their division's target because the target wasn't adjusted in the face of the law. Leadership at the top is at fault.
Yes, but the concerning thing is that this behavior you’d expect from Oracle or similar. The App Store, in-app payments etc is not bad – Apple would seem to be able to compete fairly and still win a big slice of the cake – higher prices but premium experience, like they’ve always done. So.. have they stopped believing in themselves? Or did the sweet taste of monopoly turn them greedy and arrogant beyond salvation in just a decade?
Being the market leader, Apple sets the ground rule in the market in way that makes Apple wildly profitable. However, the regulators are striking at the heart of these rules, and Apple seem intend to use its technological controls to minimize the impact of the regulators, rather than just accepting the change and move on.
The issue for Apple is that the above generates bad press against Apple which is going to erode away the brand, and the regulators might end up issuing more rules anyway.
Otherwise why go through the additional overhead and headache of implementing region-specific rules? iOS is becoming branched into 3 forks: EU, China, and rest of the world.
It's just the reality of global compliance that products end up having to be customized for each region. We were lucky for a while that China was the only country that was overly special, but that time is over.
If you want an existing example of a phone changing stuff as you change countries just look at the modem. Different territories allow for different amounts of power to be used and the phone as has to know the laws to and adapt based off where it is in order to be compliant.
iOS isn't even the #1 mobile operating system in the EU. Even in countries where it's the majority, it caps out at around 60%. Characterizing that as a "monopoly" is absurd.
Apple really trying to be the asshole here. Imagine installing work apps that disappear after 30 days.. Also what happens if the user chooses not to share their live location with apple?
People are just being dramatic because they’re not getting what they want.
The DMA doesn’t even stipulate a 30 day provision, just a stipulation that it applies to people who live or are located in the EU. There’s a bit of wiggle room on how to read that (i.e., people who live in the EU, people who are located in the EU, people who live or are located in the EU) and Apple chose the middle road, presumably with the expectation that if it turns out to be an issue it’ll be settled before the CJEU.
It specifically says "end users established or located in the Union". It sounds to me like Apple did not fully understand the definition of "established" and took the classic route of "if I don't understand it, it doesn't apply to me" rather than ask any EU institution to elaborate.
I hope this malicious approach will indeed be settled before the CJEU... with a hefty fine.
a stipulation that it applies to people who live or are located in the EU
if i travel to leave the EU for longer than 30 days, do i no longer live in the EU?
according to tax law, i am considered living in the EU as long as i spend at least 6 months per year there. so by that metric, the feature should be available for at least 6 months after leaving the EU.
Ok let's say you're completely 100% right both "logically" and "lawfully", but you as sure aren't right "morally", and "morality" is the job of judges and they are going to fuck Apple in the you know what you know (hopefully) so why defend this?
Spirit of the law vs word of the law and all, you know... jeez
you pay taxes because you live in the EU, even if you leave it brifly..
On the other hand, i am a EU citizen that live abroad and i do not pay any taxes in EU.. Unless i am visiting when i have to pay sales and services taxes..
But i pay taxes in the country i live, and i have to do it even for income i earned abroad..
And sure, there are some countries that make you pay income taxes if you are a citizen even when you live and have income abroad, like the US, but one could argue that you still have access to government services even while living abroad and those are paid via taxes.
this does not change the fact EU laws stop applying when you leave and restart applying when you come back..
Given the barrier to entry and cost, with little benefit, if I were to guess, the Epic store might be the only "third party App Store" to ever see the light of day.
> They don't lose access to the apps. I suspect the phone itself is what disables it, not sending the location to Apple.
Imagine paying a thousand dollars for a computer that actively sabotages its user based on their gps data… All because the manufacturer wants to control how someone can install a piece of software on it…
It.. doesn't bother me. But none of this is different than when said person spent a thousand dollars. If this is the sort of thing that annoys you, you should probably have bought a different device in the first place.
I'm completely tired of seeing this awful mindset. Why do you get mad when consumers make shitty practices illegal instead of just putting up with it, but not when you see companies scam people? If "just don't get scammed lol" is a valid argument then there's clearly nothing wrong with just making the practice illegal.
And I'm completely tired of the "I am going to buy a well known item, with a well known feature set, and then later complain about all of this". YOU are enabling the shitty practices by giving them money in the first place. People need to take personal responsibility. If it's important to you, take a stand BEFORE you give your money to said person.
There's no scam here. Everything is VERY well known.
I'm not buying anything from apple and I still don't want consumers to be screwed over. It's you and only you (and I hope you're being paid to do this) playing defense for billion dollar corporations selling a premium product to consumers and engaging in shitty practices. Your meme ideology doesn't work and never will work because this is more profitable than ever, and companies love to copy what apple does so it spreads. Companies are getting more anti-consumer every single year in the US and they don't need your help.
Someone might want to be able to video-call with their grandma who only knows how to use facetime, while also wanting to be able to compile and run open-source apps from source on the device they paid money for.
It's also not particularly well known either that apple has such predatory practices I don't think.
Of my friends, I don't think any of them realized the reason they couldn't buy ebooks on the iOS kindle app, and the app couldn't even have a link to the webpage where you could buy it, is Apple's anti-competitive rules to give apple books an edge. I think everyone just assumed Amazon was too dumb to design a "buy now" link.
I don't think most of my friends realize uBlock origin not existing for "chrome on iOS" is apple's fault, but rather assume the addon developer or chrome folks are at fault.
You are being dishonest. It not like you stop buying bad tomatoes from one vendor and go to one of the hundreds others with zero incurred costs for transfer.
Apple is a world duopoly, the cost of devices is enormous and device is not the only thing that exists standalone. You likely have a lot of of purchased apps, media, uploaded data, proprietary hardware infrastructure which doesn't work with other vendors (like airpods etc.) and many many other ties to the Apple.
Saying that a person should just discard all that and simply move to the other vendor is a dumb proposition.
Yeah, I really don't get the "just get an android" type of response (even though the OP here is quite polite and I'm referring to other people arguing this). If something exhibits anti-competitive behaviour, it's great if competition exists, but it does not justify the behaviour which should still be subject to typical anti-competitive laws.
So instead make it impossible to create an alternative to Apple because now there isn’t a point? Someone could have come in and done everything better than Apple and more open, but now that’s impossible. Who would bother when they could just donate to the nearest EU politician to dictate what software change they want next?
You should lobby your nearest EU politician to stop platform-holders from creating anti-competitive conditions. It damages the market, and requires regular scrutiny to prevent the corporate bean counters from deploying salami tactics.
Because guess what? Apple isn't going away, their hardware will continue to be popular, and companies will compete with them regardless. Just because one business tactic has been deemed anticompetitive doesn't mean everything is, let alone that you can't continue providing the same features under fair pretenses. Apple chooses how they respond to the legislation, and right now they are deliberately steering themselves in the most victimizing and infantile direction possible. It makes me embarrassed to be an American, where many consider this behavior an... attribute of free-market patriotism. Barf.
I didn't say they'd exist forever, just that they'd continue being around. Apple could profit $0 for the next decade and have enough cash-on-hand to continue operations for several years. It's not realistic that Apple would cease to exist immediately anyways - that's not how antitrust works.
If Apple dematerializes one day, I give you full permission to intrude on my latest comment and break the good news. There are two champagne bottles I'd like to open and I've been saving them for such an occasion.
This is a brand spanking new feature[^1], I'm not sure they knew this kind of thing would bother them until recently.
[^1] Source: TFA, the thing we're commenting on, at least, hopefully we're not just looking for comments to reply to, and then replying in a way that makes people feel small and look silly
Right. So, when the person bought the item, the expectation was that Apple's App Store was the only option. Now, there is an additional option, while in the the EU. So the feature set when the person bought the phone is the same, and there is now a new added ability.
Wow, this is a wildly defeatist & subservient mindset. It's ok to like something, and also recognize its flaws & demand better. It's kind of the underlying principle behind all of human history. But if you're so apathetic, that's fine, just sit this one out & let the people who do care try to effect change.
I'm not sure the nuance of technically not sending to Apple really matters when we talk about iOS. iOS is Apple's loyal servant, does it really matter if their control is exacted server or client side? That line is pretty blurry when it comes to Apple in general.
If the phone would not send location data then it would need to store quite a bit of geographical data to be able to accurately say if you spend last 30 days in EU. That might be harder in border regions...
I wonder if you turn off location services, and use a european VPN, if you maintain access.
If you do not have access, I would wonder if they would run across the problem google ran into with private browsing, that people expect to have privacy.
In other words, if you turn off location services, that apple will not track your location and should have (legal) no way of knowing if you are inside or outside of the EU.
"The phone" doesn't need to know anything about anything, and it's up to the user and/or any web services they use to follow local laws. Historically, physical objects have not needed to change their behavior when moving across national borders.
I think there's still issues even if you do that. I worked on a corporate firewall issue a few years ago where iPhones were getting around our DNS and outbound VPN blocking. It had something to do with DoH but for the life of me I can't remember exactly how it was related. I just remember that they were very sneaky in connecting to things that should have been blocked and were successfully blocked on the PCs and Androids.
Or worse, imagine realizing you forgot one important app when reaching your destination. Uber doesn't exist in the country you went to? You can now only install this country's taxi app through the App Store since your alternative app marketplace lost its ability to install apps...
> However, you must be in the European Union to install alternative app marketplaces and new apps from alternative app marketplaces
I'm confused at the scenario you are presenting. So in this case, you travel out of the EU, but are installing a taxi app from a non-eu country, but the app is only available in the EU?
Maybe my example wasn't the best since Uber is practically in all countries. It has however competitors which also are available in many countries and could be available as apps in this EU only store
Let's get to a more down to earth example then: you break your phone while abroad, you can't buy a new one and reinstall old apps anymore.
Or another one: you forgot to install an application available only on this alternative store before leaving (it's not that crazy, see F-Droid on Android where apps are not always available on the Play Store), you can't install it anymore since you aren't physically in the EU anymore.
> Whether or not that will be something the European Commission takes issue with, remains to be seen. After all, an EU citizen is an EU citizen even after they leave the EU.
I fail to see how this is in any way relevant. Cannabis is legal in Canada, and Canadians remain Canadian citizens abroad. If they're caught with cannabis in a country where it's illegal, they will be prosecuted for breaking the law. Laws don't follow people around like this.
On the other hand, if you do something in a foreign country which is legal in that place but illegal in your home country, you can be prosecuted back home for it.
Kind of, not entirely true for most laws, only ones of certain levels typically the big captial punishment or long term imprisonment ones such as rape, CP, murder, certain financial crimes, and conspiracies to commit said prior.
Drinking underage for example, most examples of drugs too. Even internally in the US they don't have specific right to arrest someone for smoking weed in a state that is legal as federal agents on state land (or private), not within 50 miles of a border.
Only some things in the US have "extraterritorial jurisdiction". Travel for child sex tourism (what Epsteins pals should be charged with) and bribery abroad for two examples.
Canadian authorities aren’t gonna proactively open an investigation into a murder in, say, Brazil, unless they have a reason to, like it being one of their citizens.
Same with the GDPR and EU residents who go abroad for a bit.
I think you have it a bit turned around. If I have a right under my country's laws based on my citizenship, my right doesn't cease to exist because I leave the country. For example, I continue to have 5th Amendment rights outside of the United States. Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957).
I haven't read the decision that requires Apple to open up its devices to third party stores, but if that decision is somehow premised on rights conferred by EU citizenship, then the passage you quote would be valid.
that decision is about military tribunals that will judge acts of us citizens committed at other territories but under US law.
If you are in another country and is being prosecuted under that country laws the 5th amendment not only not apply but it (or a similar law) might not even exist.
This has nothing to do with laws. This has everything to do with Apple choosing how you will use the software on your device. And they're straight up insisting that if you don't live within a geographical area, the functionality of your device will change at their whim.
this is totally about the law.. third-party stores only exist in EU because there is a law that require then to exist.
And Apple devices already behave differently based on location.
Apple watches O2 and Heart functionalities are famously limited by the watch location at the time they are enabled, US being one place where O2 is not available at the moment even while you can have it in many other countries.
Hot take: all of the above is stupid. Maybe we shouldn't make things life ending crimes when they're perfectly legal once you take a step across an imaginary line.
Maybe apple shouldn't be trying to lock down an object that they sold and no longer own and control.
Yes, I know, obviously there are situations where this mentality doesn't apply as cleanly. That doesn't mean we get to abandon all logic when it comes to legislation and corporate misbehavior.
The alternate is this distopia where a megacorp decides how long you get an alternative, possibly only until the moment you step outside the zone. Or even the moment you turn on a VPN.
The EU law here applies to Apple, not to you. Apple remains in the EU for as long as they have entities in the EU or operate in the EU. Thus Apple must follow EU law for as long as they have not exited the EU market completely.
Apple devices that are within the EU laws jurisdiction does have access to third-party stores..
apple devices that moved to another jurisdiction are no longer subject to EU laws and therefore no longer have access to third-party stores.
The big question i have is if i with my non-EU iPhone will have access to third-party stores as soon as i step into EU, even if i do not live in EU and i am not a EU citizen.
What about this is a tortured interpretation of the DMA?
Article 1 clearly states the subject matter and scope of the DMA, with subsection 2 defining which end users it pertains to. As it should, because it would be bonkers for the EU to try and regulate anything outside of their jurisdiction.
Just say you wish it applied outside of the EU but that you understand the logical jurisdictional limitations and call it a day.
But I thought the only reason Apple prevented third-party stores and sideloaded apps in the first place was to improve security. Therefore, I’m sure that disabling app updates once someone spends a month outside the EU must improve security, too. Right!?
I was having exactly the same thought. Doesn't apple's new policy show all their arguments against the DMA are complete crap? They have acted in bad faith right from the start.
Are you sure about that? This makes it sound like updates also stop after 30 days:
"If you leave the European Union, you can continue to open and use apps that you previously installed from alternative app marketplaces. Alternative app marketplaces can continue updating those apps for up to 30 days after you leave the European Union, and you can continue using alternative app marketplaces to manage previously installed apps."
Brussels effect. EU come up with something, other powers will start implementing it too. Japan is already poking into Apple in the same way and India might join with their demands as well. I believe that China already has its own App Store and then you have only USA not willing to make regulations.
A company that produces a device that fakes GPS (with extremely weak RF so as not to draw the ire of FCC or other government bodies) to convince the phone it is in Europe.
This is wildly off-topic, but a prosecutor asking for a defense witness to be "treated as hostile" is redundant. They're hostile by default.
The request to "treat someone as hostile" is about their OWN witness that THEY introduced getting turned into a hostile aka opposition witness.
> A hostile witness is a witness who testifies against the party who has called them to testify. The examiner may ask a hostile witness leading questions, as in cross-examination. Also known as an adverse witness.
As I said, a witness from the other side is always hostile, so asking for it would never make sense.
To give an example: Criminal case, prosecutor brought in a on-scene witness to testify. But the witness is arguing against the prosecutor's case/evidence, so they request the judge to allow them to turn a witness hostile which allows a different style of questioning.
Don't really think so. Whatsapp was blocked many times in my country and the only thing it caused was for companies to realize they were relying too much on it and for people start using telegram.
You think normal people give a shit about this whole thing? The moment Facebook doesn’t work in Europe people are voting out everyone who had anything to do with this.
That’s never gonna happen. Something like that would need to be done under antitrust regulation, such as art. 102 TFEU because the DMA isn’t antitrust regulation and doesn’t have mechanisms to establish such violations.
While 102 TFEU (and in particular the CJEU case law surrounding it) has stacked the deck extremely in favor of the EC, in part due to it being designed and interpreted on the basis of European administrative law traditions, a ban or divestiture will only be imposed by the CJEU in the most extreme cases.
A case even the EC, with the entire deck stacked in their favor, will never be able to make. Edit: Specifically for Apple, the others, depending on who we’re talking about, might be a different story.
What would be available for phones and laptops in this scenario? The FairPhone, System 76 laptop... what are the other options? (Assuming you also mean Microsoft)
I'm sure they could pass laws to make these things possible.
Assuming that these ideals are correct, I'd think that new device makers would pop up to satisfy these markets. I think something similar has happened with Huawei in China. The EU is going hard after FAANG, but if they all pulled out, does the EU have anything that can replace them?
Edit: Actually, Fairphone is a great example. I think it's the sort of thing that satisfies all the ideals that the EU is trying to get to.
Is it too much to hope that this is a natural experiment that we can learn from? Either Apple is right, and this will lead to worse security, a worse app ecosystem, and damaged business in the EU…or they are wrong, and their business and ecosystem will be unharmed. If the latter occurs, will it encourage them to rethink their approach and allow for a more open ecosystem everywhere?
This sounds very much like Apple being maliciously compliant. Similar to their complaint against Epic Games...
I'd be interested to see what the EU makes of this.
I believe the grace period is entirely voluntary on their part, and since they're digging their heels in on the entire matter, I'm honestly surprised (though not impressed) by their generosity.
> Apple had previously said that it would give EU citizens a period of graze
Three paragraph article. Couldn't proof read it. Fair enough.
i'm curious of the author's normal use of the word graze that the autocorrect selected graze. do they type about farm/ranch animals that frequently? do they write about taking "samples" from the produce section of the grocery?
When you are on EU embassy (Any Embassy of country in the EU) then it is considered sovereign territory of that country, where laws of that country applies. So answer is yes.
The embassy operates within the UK and must respect British laws, but the UK authorities have limited rights to enter the embassy premises or exert jurisdiction over those premises without permission from the embassy's country (Iran, in this case). For criminal matters or serious breaches of law, the host country and the embassy's country typically engage in diplomatic discussions to resolve the issue.
No. Embassies and consulates are not considered the territory of that country. They have certain special properties and immunities.
This is from the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961. This agreement says the premises of embassies to be inviolable, meaning the host country cannot enter them without permission from the embassy's country. This makes it seem like embassies are like islands of their home country within a foreign nation.
However, the land on which an embassy is situated remains under the sovereignty of the host country, not the country that the embassy represents. The host country retains ultimate control over the land, although it must respect the embassy's independence and immunities. Diplomatic premises are subject to the laws of the host country to a certain extent, but with significant exceptions that allow the embassy to function as a representation of its home country's government.
oh that's brilliant. i wonder how detailed Apple's geofence maps are, because by international law, you are absolutely correct in that is how they are considered.
I can't find anything here [0][1] which implies that embassies are foreign soil. I believe, for example, that if, hypothetically, a woman were to give birth in a US embassy they would not become a US citizen.
Apple: “While you are in the EU, you get reduced protections and greater risks due to DMA. Once you are out of the EU, you get the best protections that the Apple App Store offers. No malware. No scamware. No adware. No silly apps with enormously unbelievable weekly subscriptions. No apps that are an exact copy of another. You benefit from our investments and efforts in our legendary and famous app review process. Don’t ask us. Just ask our developers about how great our App Store is.” /s
Seriously though, can Apple claim or pretend that it’s protecting EU residents and that once someone is out, they’re not residents anymore? The 30-day period for something as critical as apps in today’s world is too short though.
There’s no other way than to interpret this, and the preceding actions by Apple, as a temper tantrum of malicious compliance. That begs a whole new set of questions.
Optically, this is the behavior you’d expect from companies that stopped innovating and are clinging onto power with the power of lawyers. It seems like an incredibly small hill to sacrifice your reputation on.
Are their long term ambitions to live off the 30% cut? Because it sure as hell appears like they’re fighting an existential battle, which doesn’t inspire confidence in their visionary leadership. Perhaps the best thing for Apple is to take away their comfort blanket, so they’re setting sights on innovation again.