Apple has threatened to stop selling iPhones and other devices in the European Union (home to over 500,000,000 affluent consumers) if the bloc doesn't rescind the Digital Markets Act, a democratically accountable anti-monopoly law that bans Apple from blocking third parties from offering services to iPhone owners:
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@pluralistic As threats go, that's like taking yourself hostage, but OK, Tim, you do you.
@pluralistic Haven't read the thread yet but I'm immediately reminded of John Oliver's last piece about Trump and how the only response to a bully is "Fuck you. Make me."
Applecan't afford to lose this many customers. It's a bluff.
@pluralistic Sure Timmy Apple, stop selling your most profitable product in one of the biggest markets there is. Forget shooting yourself in the foot, think blowing it off with dynamite.
@pluralistic Hope the EU calls this bluff.
@pluralistic Trading on Trump's willingness to attack Europe for trying to regulate American businesses, obvs.
I wonder if they'll need to bribe him harder to keep his attention.
@pluralistic I don't feel threatened :)
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If Trump can seize Chinese companies like Tiktok and sell them to his major donors at a 90% discount, then American companies have no right to cry foul when the EU gets rid of the America First Copyright Directive and lets Europeans choose to get their software, updates, and hardware from European companies.
31/
The shortest, most efficient, most reliable path to reestablishing technological sovereignty for the EU's half-billion residents and 27 member-states is to allow domestic firms to take over the relationship between the Trump-controlled American tech giants and the Europeans who rely on their technology.
30/
The EU doesn't need to be a technology-taker - it can be a technology *maker*. The Apple/Google duopoly may have sewn up the mobile market with illegal monopoly tactics, but that doesn't mean that the EU will never spawn another Nokia or Ericsson.
29/
Doing that becomes even easier if Apple exits the EU and abandons EU customers, cutting off their supply of security patches and application updates. After all, Europeans *own* their Apple devices. It's up to them - not Apple - whether they want to trust their fellow Europeans to protect their security and add new functionality of their own property.
28/
Bringing this full circle: Article 6 of the EUCD is also the law that stops European companies from reverse-engineering the iPhone and creating their own app stores, without having to rely on Apple's help, Given that Apple has flagrantly violated laws that order it to open its app store, it's time to unleash Europe's accomplished legion of top technologists on the problem:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma
27/
That means that a European company that made an account migration tool to help European companies or government agencies move *their own data* out of a US Big Tech silo could face liability under Article 6 of the EUCD, with severe criminal and civil penalties. EUCD 6 gives American tech giants more rights to Europeans' copyrighted works than the Europeans who created those works. It's a terrible law, and after a quarter century, it's long past its expiry date.
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In 2001, the EU - under pressure from the USA - included an "anticircumvention" rule in the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD). Article 6 of the EUCD mirrors the language of Section 1201 of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, banning reverse-engineering and adversarial interoperability, even where no copyright infringement takes place.
25/
This is called "adversarial interoperability" and is eminently do-able, as Apple proved when they broke open Microsoft Office by creating the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote):
The major impediment to this kind of seamless bulk migration tool isn't the technological challenge - it's the law.
24/
This is called "adversarial interoperability" and is eminently do-able, as Apple proved when they broke open Microsoft Office by creating the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote):
The major impediment to this kind of seamless bulk migration tool isn't the technological challenge - it's the law.
24/
If leaving Office365 means leaving the documents your company, organization or government agency has ever created, or losing all the sharing and collaboration permissions, or losing all the edit-histories, well, no one is gonna migrate.
Thankfully, this is something technology can easily fix: all you need to do is reverse-engineer the US offering and create a tool that extracts and transforms the data to the new format, and moves a copy of it into the new Eurostack services.
23/
Nearly all of the emphasis on Eurostack has been on building the data-centers and creating these applications, but some ways, this is the least important part of the project. Cloning GDocs or Office365 or iWork is the easy part. The hard part is *migrating* from US-controlled platforms to their Eurostack equivalents.
22/
Microsoft publicly admitted that it can't stop US authorities from conducting secret surveillance of EU citizens' (and EU governments') data, even when that data is stored on server in the EU:
The EU's response is something called "Eurostack" - a top-to-bottom "stack" of technologies from data-centers to operating systems and applications made and maintained by EU entities (for-profits, nonprofits, and public bodies):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp
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