But that's not the story here. I hate ads as much as anyone, but this action is a matter of market competition, not privacy. They're completely different fights and intelligent people ought to be able to distinguish between the two. Anti-competitive behavior by Google, Apple, Meta, etc. is what got us into this mess with tracking and privacy violations in the first place.
It's the market for privacy violations. I'd go so far as to say that improving competitiveness in this market probably makes the world worse, by making privacy violations more profitable. If they had fined them for not allowing sideloading, or not allowing third-party payments, it would be a different story. Those are markets I want to see grow and thrive.
They received a complaint, they investigated and issued a fine. You're asking them to selectively enforce laws based on their subjective opinion of some industry, which would be highly illegal.
The entire advertising industry needs to die and I'll support every fight in pursuit of that goal, but this isn't about that. You don't dismantle an industry by picking a winner and letting them get away with crime.
And yes, there needs to be an EU-wide action over all of those other issues you mentioned too but that has nothing to do with this particular case.
Can you do me a favor and familiarize yourself with the executive summary document instead of just replying "nuh uh" out of ignorance? See paragraphs 5, 10, and 12 in particular.
They broke competition law. The fact that did so in the advertising industry as opposed to any other is irrelevant to this case.
You shouldn't be surprised. Almost every single story involving the EU and Apple that I've seen over the past few years was full of low effort responses and generic rants about the EU by people who clearly haven't read past the title, especially when it comes to fines.
Take your pick: "EU is fining us to finance itself", "EU can't innovate", "I can't believe that EU is fining Apple for [gross misunderstanding of the situation]"
You don't need to read minds to know that abusing your dominant market position in one market to disadvantage your competitors in a different market (advertising) has a very high likelihood of breaking competition rules. That's a textbook example of anti-competitive behavior.
When did they change their minds, can you provide a link to a previous regulatory decision which approved this behavior?
The press release is.. not great. The summary document linked at the bottom of the page is written in English and makes it clear that the fine was issued due to their double standards:
> xii. As a matter of fact, revenues from App Store services increased, in terms of higher
commissions collected from developers through the platform; likewise, Apple’s advertising division, which is not subject to the same stringent rules, ultimately benefited from increased revenues and higher volumes of intermediated ads
Yes, precisely, take a look at the summary document [1] at the bottom of the article.
> xii. As a matter of fact, revenues from App Store services increased, in terms of higher
commissions collected from developers through the platform; likewise, Apple’s advertising division, which is not subject to the same stringent rules, ultimately benefited from increased revenues and higher volumes of intermediated ads
> xiii. Therefore, considering that Apple holds an absolute dominant position in the market for the supply to developers of platforms for the online distribution of apps to users of the iOS operating system, the Authority established that Apple’s conduct amounts to an exploitative abuse, in breach of Article 102 TFEU, that started in April 2021 and is still ongoing.
Absolutely not. They're not writing code or performing most of the work that programmers do, therefore they're not [working as] programmers. Their work ends up producing code, but they're not coders any more than my manager is.
A "vibecoder" is to a programmer what script kiddie is to a hacker.
Correction: Nobody wants to pay for you to learn, yet they implicitly do it and rely on it.
If companies decide that professional learning is unnecessary in the age of AI they'll be committing a horrible blunder. Their "fuck around" phase might sting, but missing an entire generation of skilled professionals is going to make our value skyrocket in the "find out" phase, a few years down the line.
Well that's a gross oversimplification of the process. Hunting for a missing semicolon is a basic mechanical task that doesn't require much thought.
Engaging with an intellectual problem, trying to solve it one way, failing, reasoning through the process and the requirements, trying to discover a better way of solving something, going down some wrong paths, backtracking, merging diverging ideas and ultimately finding a solution is going to yield an infinitely deeper understanding of the problem, what works, what doesn't, and improve your general intuition and problem-solving skills.
Deep engagement builds deep understanding, shallow engagement builds shallow understanding. There's no substitute for doing the hard work yourself - I've tutored classmates in school and I find this rather obvious. A tutor (human or LLM) can try to find a way to explain something in a way that you understand but if you don't do most of the hard work yourself it's never going to stick. I noticed that when I would spoon-feed answers to people it would always just lead them into a false sense of confidence.
My argument here is that you can still do hard work that helps you learn while leaning on an LLM to help along the way.
There's a reason kids do better when assigned a 1-1 tutor. LLMs, used effectively, can have a similar effect. Probably a weaker effect although maybe it can be stronger since there's no shame involved in asking an LLM a question.
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