“ In particular, Apple – and Facebook – are gatekeepers because they “are digital platforms that provide an important gateway between business users and consumers – whose position can grant them the power to act as a private rule maker, and thus creating a bottleneck in the digital economy”. Spotify is not in that position.”
How is Spotify not in that position? I see no difference between Facebook, Apple and Spotify in this case, except for the fact that they gatekeep different things.
Spotify exceeds neither the revenue threshold of 7.5 billion euros nor the market cap threshold of 75 billion euros that is part of the definition of gatekeepers in Chapter II, Article 3 of the Digital Markets Act. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Even though they're a gateway between business users and condumers, they're not considered an important gateway because the music industry isn't big enough. (Or maybe Spotify's share of the EU music market is just too small.)
That threshold is precisely the problem in the first place. It is a weird and arbitrary limit that "just by coincidence" happens to target a bunch of really huge American companies.
Personally I hope it is that they just put that limit at the high number to warm up and then ratchet it down. But then they should say so.
Surely that limit is the result of some political discussion, thus arbitrary. But I think there is no scientific way of setting such limit, so any limit you come up with will be arbitrary.
> Surely that limit is the result of some political discussion, thus arbitrary.
The usual case is that the limit is certainly the result of political discussion, but not arbitrary. What you'd expect is that somebody made a list of targets, and then the thresholds were intentionally defined to include those targets and nobody else.
In political contexts involving purchasing, this is called "single-sourcing". In contexts involving persecution, it is more frowned upon, and I'm not aware of a general name for the practice. But it's not a different practice.
> What you'd expect is that somebody made a list of targets, and then the thresholds were intentionally defined to include those targets and nobody else.
Probably you're right, but the list of targets itself would be arbitrary, and likely was subject to discussion as well.
I suspect a point to Gruber on that one - there is no logical reason to say that privacy impact is proportional to market cap or revenue. This is just the EU attempting to leverage their lack of high profile software companies.
All fair in love and war; but this article is fooling few on this being a matter of principle. It looks like protectionism.
The Digital Markets Act and gatekeeper designation are primarily about antitrust, not privacy. Hence the focus on financial criteria. For privacy, there's the GDPR.
No idea how accurate this is, but according to https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/ in 2023 Spotify had €13.2B revenue globally, and 40.5% users in Europe. Assuming that revenue is spread equally (which is a big assumption) that means that Spotify’s revenue in the EU in 2023 was €5.3B.
1. Size. DMA requirement is >=7.5b turnover in the EU, or worldwide market cap >=75b. Not the case for Spotify.
2. Non-provision of core platform services. It's not just "important gateway between business users and consumers", it's "important gateway between businesses and consumers *in relation to core platform services*". Core platform services are e.g. search engines, operating systems, browsers, app stores and so on. This is why Spotify isn't a gatekeeper.
And the exact same reasoning applies to American companies. Video streaming platforms like Netflix are also excluded for example, even though Netflix has a market cap >=75b.
Core platform services include "online intermediation services" and "video sharing platform services" both of which Netflix could be argued to count as. But I guess there are probably fewer than 10,000 EU businesses distributing content through Netflix?
I was under the impression that Netflix was not deemed video sharing platform because they don't actively dictate what is and is not allowed on the platform the way YouTube does. But maybe it was the 10,000 rule, who knows. To my knowledge the EU never made explicit why companies were not deemed gatekeeper.
At some point, labelling gatekeepers comes down to how many "gatekeepers" are there resources to go after.
Naming all potential gatekeepers would only set the EU up to look capricious when it still only had enough resources to go after its highest priority targets.
So there will never be an obvious rational line of who is in or out. Just the sued and unsued.
I believe he is saying Facebook isn't entitled to tracking, but consumers aren't entitled to Facebook either. Especially given Apple has not relented on the anti-tracking provisions, I don't see the contradiction, especially since one is an interaction between a government and a company and the other is the interaction between two companies.
Seems like a false equivalence and trying to forcefit two things. It's not a binary choice as the writer puts it. Apple's tracking transparency gave users a choice whether to enable tracking/analytics outside the app usage. (inside the app, any company would know what the user is doing with right analytics stack). Every affected company had a choice to either continue offering the same product or make changes to their model. Any affected company could have just said, "Hey, we need personalized ads to pay our costs and that is what keeps this service free. If you think it's intrusive, we respect the choice, but we cannot offer it for free." Apple could not have stopped it or delisted the app for changing the business model. Here, EU is basically denying that option to Facebook.
> In competition, actions which are legal when you’re not a monopoly become illegal when you are a monopoly.
This sentence represents basic lack of understanding of the monopolistic behavior. See Qualcomm's antitrust case which they won on appeal in both EU and US which they could not have won if this sentence was true.
"But apparently, making up ports is addictive, because today, RFC 1700 and the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) have defined no less than 1,023 official "well-known ports," and many other unofficial ones to boot. And those are just a subset of a grand total of 65,535 ports."
Do you know how your firewall works? I run physical ones. The OS on your Mac is basically wide open. An "ip" "domain" "url" can all change, you own the ports...
It’s like high-frequency trading for best value ad spots worldwide with huge amounts of data generated and connected.
Like trading it starts very easy but ends up in 1ms ping difference.
There is no way out, the system is build that way. The sheep get milked.
It’s not hard to understand the change of heart. Fanboys agree with the stance of their chosen company no matter what hypocrisy or logical fallacy that might invite.
When it’s Apple versus Facebook, John is on Apple’s side.
When it’s Apple versus the EU, John is on Apple’s side.
He’s one of the most overrated and pro-corporation tech personalities out there. And his website’s formatting on mobile is inexcusable.
The recent App Store changes prompted by the EU should demonstrate these companies really do need some pressure from governments to improve competition.
I just want to run full Mac OS X on an iPad Air :(
I would prefer the market to be exerting that pressure. But big tech has done such a good job of erecting barriers to entry, while governmetns have done such a bad job of anti-monopoly regulation, that steps like this are now necessary.
What's crazy is that in the century before the modern Internet, radio and TV stations, newspapers, and magazines somehow survived just fine selling "dumb" advertising (sometimes supplemented with end-user fees). What we didn't have back then were multiple advertising companies (that insist on being called "tech" companies) perched at the top of the S&P500 with higher market caps than God. Yes, having disgustingly intimate knowledge of the thoughts and actions of billions of people is very lucrative, but why the fuck was that ever allowed to be a legal business model?
I know this was meant to be hyperbole but a quick fact-check shows that faith economy was in the triple-comma club before any of the tech companies. But, that's in aggregate and sidesteps the whole philosophical question of deity and property...
and to address your actual question, "it's the economy." Go to any legislator and show how the business model leverages the internet to unprecedented economic scale, you will get a good decade or two of enthusiastic support. The whole "we can self-regulate" was a stroke of luck and good timing/circumstance (and heavy lobbying, I presume),... and a demonstration of just how much faster tech can move than any legislative effort was enough to convince anyone else.
> newspapers, and magazines somehow survived selling "dumb" advertising
I think it's pretty clear that at least these (including their online versions) cannot survive in masse. We can argue around the reasons for this, but that's what happening.
The pre-Internet media landscape flourished for a century with "dumb" ads. Surveillance capitalism is not inevitable; we allowed it to happen. (Sorry, I ninja-edited what you quoted to be clearer.)
The problem is the adpocalypse. Everyone stopped paying for ads that weren’t the super-targeted kind.
I was supervising a MS student on a project trying to mess with the moderately-targeted ads of the day. We watched this happen in real time as it wrecked our hopes of ever writing our paper. All of the ads we were studying got replaced overnight with much cheaper generic ads for cars or airlines or big-brand liquor. And then websites started going out of business.
> The problem is the adpocalypse. Everyone stopped paying for ads that weren’t the super-targeted kind.
Yeah, I kind of get it. What's the point for paying for a regular untargeted print or web banner if for a little more you can get extremely targeted one. And this drove the market to the current state.
But I guess with the Internet appearance and it being powered by ads, people just got used to free content. And this is the biggest conceptual issue, as now we don't even want to pay $1.99 for an online newspaper despite the fact it's extremely cheap in comparison to literally anything.
They were still targeted whether by geography (newspapers for the most part) or type of content (many/most magazines) so they weren't completely "dumb."
My problem is that an open web removes gatekeepers. The way the EU is making rules is ham fisted and technically limiting on development of ideas.
If the EU simply focused on the open web and privacy they could stay away from these weird rules regarding sizes of markets. I think the the article is disingenuous by equating a platform's popularity with a need for rules to hamper that platform's functionality.
The internet/web is our open resource for communication. I'm all for any all rules that maintain the individual rights to publish and subscribe on the internet. The EU should focus on open protocols and privacy.
I think it's a mistake to equate the internet with an App Store market place. The internet is a place for individual freedoms and app stores are for businesses.
Isn't the whole point about size of market to encourage openness and competition?
If I'm a five person start-up, compliance with rules can act as a barrier to entry, and keep a market to only established players. If certain rules only kick in when I am established enough to be able to comply, then that's encouraging smaller entities at the expense of larger.
Saying one should encourage open protocols and privacy is all well and good, but how can one do that, and more importantly, how can one enforce it when abusive companies purposefully act contrary to that.
Yes, it is about openness and competition. What I'm saying is that the current climate is over-valuing the App Store market when the real openness and competition should be happening on the open web.
I see this caused by the financial world's excitement for the app Store economy. This same "irrational exuberance" happened during the .com cycle.
Developers/entrepreneurs should be focused on the open web as the delivery mechanism which bypasses all app Store rules. This is freedom to me.
Regulators should be watching the "public space" of the internet and worry less about the "private space" of the app Store economy and platform.
The regulators should make it is simple to publish on port 80 and port 443. I think we have that. A five person start up should do everything they can to minimize the amount of regulated data they collect.
I would worry less how an abusive company might act and more on how to delivery a good experience with one's product.
How abusive can a big company be on the internet?(excluding ISPs). My point is that organic communities on the internet is where freedom happens. Anyone expecting to get freedom from a product in an app Store is mistaken. App stores can provide amazing convenience. Apple essentially built a global store that handled taxes and regulations seamlessly for it's developers. The process is so seamless everyone thinks it should be free.
That stance is incredibly naive. Seriously if the FANGs of the world can literally spend billions to keep you addicted to their content do you think it makes an ounce of difference that you can publish your blog on port 443?
It does to me. I don't know why you think FANGs have any effect on technology I may work on. If the world can maintain access to each other directly over 80 and 443 than people who value narrowcasting over broadcasting can freely ignore the FANGs. ISPs on the other hand can be sneaky.
> people who value narrowcasting over broadcasting can freely ignore the FANGs
It is very difficult and costly in time or other resources for most people and businesses to "ignore the FANGs"
Parasitical businesses are generally not just parasitical. They balance providing real value with how much they can extract, in complex ways.
People who want other people to watch their high quality content want to be found by as many people as would benefit from their content. So they post on Youtube which gets them their audience, but now they are helping Youtube funnel their viewers to trash content and to be surveilled.
I know it's off topic, and ycombinator's rules discorage meta discussions, but I just want to say at least once, that in contrast to other discussion boards, here I can trust that somebody will come up with a well versed response to an evenly thought out post, pointing out the gap, if one exists. So kudos to you both.
Prominent Apple (industry? Mainly Apple I think) commentator.
I think the author's using it more as a device to say that you should care about/agree with what he previously said, to make similar points himself, rather than that you should care about Gruber's opinion changing.
Every now and then, I hear someone getting killed just because he looked at the murderer (mauvais regard, in French). We also know our reactions and feelings if a stranger walks around our house and looks through the windows (we won't tell him "keep looking in, we have nothing to hide).
But these tech dinosaurs are looking everywhere around and within us, still we feed them.
How is Spotify not in that position? I see no difference between Facebook, Apple and Spotify in this case, except for the fact that they gatekeep different things.
Even though they're a gateway between business users and condumers, they're not considered an important gateway because the music industry isn't big enough. (Or maybe Spotify's share of the EU music market is just too small.)
Personally I hope it is that they just put that limit at the high number to warm up and then ratchet it down. But then they should say so.
The usual case is that the limit is certainly the result of political discussion, but not arbitrary. What you'd expect is that somebody made a list of targets, and then the thresholds were intentionally defined to include those targets and nobody else.
In political contexts involving purchasing, this is called "single-sourcing". In contexts involving persecution, it is more frowned upon, and I'm not aware of a general name for the practice. But it's not a different practice.
Probably you're right, but the list of targets itself would be arbitrary, and likely was subject to discussion as well.
All fair in love and war; but this article is fooling few on this being a matter of principle. It looks like protectionism.
Where did you get the “far exceeds” figure from?
1. Size. DMA requirement is >=7.5b turnover in the EU, or worldwide market cap >=75b. Not the case for Spotify.
2. Non-provision of core platform services. It's not just "important gateway between business users and consumers", it's "important gateway between businesses and consumers *in relation to core platform services*". Core platform services are e.g. search engines, operating systems, browsers, app stores and so on. This is why Spotify isn't a gatekeeper.
And the exact same reasoning applies to American companies. Video streaming platforms like Netflix are also excluded for example, even though Netflix has a market cap >=75b.
Naming all potential gatekeepers would only set the EU up to look capricious when it still only had enough resources to go after its highest priority targets.
So there will never be an obvious rational line of who is in or out. Just the sued and unsued.
Which is not to say he is right.
> In competition, actions which are legal when you’re not a monopoly become illegal when you are a monopoly.
This sentence represents basic lack of understanding of the monopolistic behavior. See Qualcomm's antitrust case which they won on appeal in both EU and US which they could not have won if this sentence was true.
Burn it all down.
https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
Do you know how your firewall works? I run physical ones. The OS on your Mac is basically wide open. An "ip" "domain" "url" can all change, you own the ports...
I use T/P Shark to store everything in a local graph database and then perform cluster, outlier, etc on it.
IPInfo API for additional details not in the packet. I have scripts that batch process IP addresses.
Because I want to.
There is no way out, the system is build that way. The sheep get milked.
The cheese made with sheep milk is called Pecorino. Very tasty cheese :)
[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/
When it’s Apple versus Facebook, John is on Apple’s side.
When it’s Apple versus the EU, John is on Apple’s side.
He’s one of the most overrated and pro-corporation tech personalities out there. And his website’s formatting on mobile is inexcusable.
I just want to run full Mac OS X on an iPad Air :(
https://www.cultofmac.com/717078/run-mac-os-x-iphone-ipad-wi...
It’s literally never been that way. The gilded age had to be ended by regulation just like the tech gilded age needs to be ended by regulation.
The thing about the market is that it doesn’t care if people starve or if every company on the planet merges into a super conglomerate.
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
I know this was meant to be hyperbole but a quick fact-check shows that faith economy was in the triple-comma club before any of the tech companies. But, that's in aggregate and sidesteps the whole philosophical question of deity and property...
and to address your actual question, "it's the economy." Go to any legislator and show how the business model leverages the internet to unprecedented economic scale, you will get a good decade or two of enthusiastic support. The whole "we can self-regulate" was a stroke of luck and good timing/circumstance (and heavy lobbying, I presume),... and a demonstration of just how much faster tech can move than any legislative effort was enough to convince anyone else.
I was supervising a MS student on a project trying to mess with the moderately-targeted ads of the day. We watched this happen in real time as it wrecked our hopes of ever writing our paper. All of the ads we were studying got replaced overnight with much cheaper generic ads for cars or airlines or big-brand liquor. And then websites started going out of business.
If the EU simply focused on the open web and privacy they could stay away from these weird rules regarding sizes of markets. I think the the article is disingenuous by equating a platform's popularity with a need for rules to hamper that platform's functionality.
The internet/web is our open resource for communication. I'm all for any all rules that maintain the individual rights to publish and subscribe on the internet. The EU should focus on open protocols and privacy.
I think it's a mistake to equate the internet with an App Store market place. The internet is a place for individual freedoms and app stores are for businesses.
If I'm a five person start-up, compliance with rules can act as a barrier to entry, and keep a market to only established players. If certain rules only kick in when I am established enough to be able to comply, then that's encouraging smaller entities at the expense of larger.
Saying one should encourage open protocols and privacy is all well and good, but how can one do that, and more importantly, how can one enforce it when abusive companies purposefully act contrary to that.
I see this caused by the financial world's excitement for the app Store economy. This same "irrational exuberance" happened during the .com cycle.
Developers/entrepreneurs should be focused on the open web as the delivery mechanism which bypasses all app Store rules. This is freedom to me.
Regulators should be watching the "public space" of the internet and worry less about the "private space" of the app Store economy and platform.
The regulators should make it is simple to publish on port 80 and port 443. I think we have that. A five person start up should do everything they can to minimize the amount of regulated data they collect.
I would worry less how an abusive company might act and more on how to delivery a good experience with one's product.
How abusive can a big company be on the internet?(excluding ISPs). My point is that organic communities on the internet is where freedom happens. Anyone expecting to get freedom from a product in an app Store is mistaken. App stores can provide amazing convenience. Apple essentially built a global store that handled taxes and regulations seamlessly for it's developers. The process is so seamless everyone thinks it should be free.
It is very difficult and costly in time or other resources for most people and businesses to "ignore the FANGs"
Parasitical businesses are generally not just parasitical. They balance providing real value with how much they can extract, in complex ways.
People who want other people to watch their high quality content want to be found by as many people as would benefit from their content. So they post on Youtube which gets them their audience, but now they are helping Youtube funnel their viewers to trash content and to be surveilled.
It is all a sticky rat's nest.
I think the author's using it more as a device to say that you should care about/agree with what he previously said, to make similar points himself, rather than that you should care about Gruber's opinion changing.
He blogs about Apple.
But these tech dinosaurs are looking everywhere around and within us, still we feed them.