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.
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.