Apple and Meta Are Mad Over Minimal E.U. Fines ⇥ ec.europa.eu

The European Commission:

Today, the European Commission found that Apple breached its anti-steering obligation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and that Meta breached the DMA obligation to give consumers the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data. Therefore, the Commission has fined Apple and Meta with €500 million and €200 million respectively.

The two decisions come after extensive dialogue with the companies concerned allowing them to present in detail their views and arguments.

A Financial Times article last month suggested these fines would be “minimal”, but I suppose that is entirely relative. Apple and Meta could have been fined up to 10% of their annual worldwide revenue — earnings which total hundreds of billions of dollars each — so €500 million does, in fact, seem to be “minimal”. And that speaks to the power and size of these corporations. Call it a warning.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:

“The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards,” Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said.

[…]

“Today’s announcements are yet another example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple in a series of decisions that are bad for the privacy and security of our users, bad for products, and force us to give away our technology for free,” Apple said. “We have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for. Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to move the goal posts every step of the way.”

I am halfway through “The Big Myth” and it is striking to read so many of the same complaints from detractors of regulation no matter when or for what issue. Pick any of the past couple-hundred years and it is apparently a regulatory sweet spot, according to industry representatives at the time. These complaints feel derivative.

That does not mean all new regulation is justified, well-considered, or without negative consequences. However, it is not as though either Apple or Meta stumbled into the exact structure they did to comply with their interpretation of the law on paper while evading the Commission’s expectations. Nobody expects either company to “give away [their] technology for free”, in the words of an unnamed Apple spokesperson. One cannot, for example, run iOS apps on non-Apple system, and the company builds the cost of software and updates into each product’s price.