I trust my EU bureaucrats much more than I'd trust the public service crooks in the White House.

EU did bring regulations that helped consumers. I have a feeling that criticism of EU regulations mostly come from people who are not in the EU.

Well, Google has marketed Android as an open source operating system (AOSP) and openness about the system [1] and encouraged manufacturers and developers to build on it based on the premise of openness and of course being "free". People advocated for Android because it was open source compared to other alternatives. But with this change they are simply ending that openness. People that have developed F-Droid and other alternative stores have contributed to the platform value (such as not being able to de-google their phone), the same goes for many other developers who have spent countless of hours developing for Android.

To say they don't owe you nothing seems like a betrayal on the promise that Android was an open platform (and open source).

> You are free to not use their products or start a company to compete

That's not an option as you are making it out to be. For a user switching means buying a new phone, repurchasing apps (if you bought) and maybe apps won't be even available to the new system, for developers that means all their knowledge about the system gone. Building a mobile operating system requires millions if not billions of dollars, years of work and convincing developers and businesses (hardware makers) to use your operating system. The barrier to enter is so high that telling people to just compete with Google is not a realistic solution.

[1] https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...

Party A does not owe Party B the right to sell in Party A:s legal area.

Party B is allowed to choose not to sell in EU. If you wanna sell in EU you have to comply with EU rules. If you wanna sell in US you have to comply with US laws. That simple.

Maybe "intelectual property" is really imaginary property given how the same big companies just gobble data from other people and companies wothout permission to feed their AI models (Facebook with books, recently NVIDIA with milions of videos from Youtube).

I guess they would not due that if they really believed some questionable synthetic construct like "intelectual property" really existed ?

That is not how the European Union works. One of the core goals of the EU is to guarantee the European single market. One of the core principles of the single market is the Freedom to establish and provide services [1]. The Apple/Google duopoly have effectively created a market within the single market where the core principles of the single market do not apply anymore.

Tech has a strong tendency to favor outcomes with only a handful large players that make competition impossible due to network effects, etc., distorting the market. The Digital Markets Act was made to address this problem.

IANAL, but Google's Android changes seem like a fairly clear violation of the DMA.

This is typically hard for people from the US to grasp (I saw that you are not originally from the US though). In Europe, capitalism is not the end goal, the goal of capitalism is to serve the people and if that fails, it needs to be regulated.

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As an aside, the lengths people go to defend a company with $402.836B yearly revenue :).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_single_market#Four_fr...

Yes. I am effectively asking you what the moral justification for DMA is. I understand that lawmakers can make whatever law they want. I understand they made it. I am curious how people who agree this should be possible think of this from a moral angle, especially as engineers who make their living by creating intellectual property and probably wouldn’t want to see control of it seized randomly

I'd ask the inverse of the question: morally, should a single gatekeeper have the right to deny two consenting parties the ability for one to run the other's software?

Especially when that ability has been established practice and depended upon for decades? And the gate-kept device in question is many users' primary gateway to the modern world?

There's nuance here, of course - I'm not morally obliged to help you run Doom on your Tamagotchi just because you want to do so. But many people around the world rely on an Android device as their only personal computing device (and this is arguably more true for Android than it is for iOS). And to install myself as an arbiter of what code they can and cannot run, with full knowledge that I could at any time be required to leverage that capability at the behest of a government those worldwide users never agreed to be dependent on? That would be a morally fraught system for me to create.

At some point free markets become fiction. There's no financially viable way to start competing businesses in markets as entrenched as mobile OSes. Otherwise this would have happened. And if that becomes anti consumers, then the consumers start changing the rules the companies operate under. Because in a democracy we have more consumers than CEOs,so they vote with majority.

(This obviously simplifies things, but ultimately we as humans still haven't found the one and only true philosophy or moral, and maybe that's not possible (I'm no philosopher))

The moral justification is that I am a citizen, and can demand the laws I want. When enough people think like me, we can actually make it a law. By holding the smartphone OS oligopoly these companies hold a lot of power on the people. I do not like that. Hence I like laws that try to change that.

> especially as engineers who make their living by creating intellectual property and probably wouldn’t want to see control of it seized randomly

If these people try to use their intellectual property to control my device and hence my ability to do things, I want to have a say what they do. Yes, that is what software is: directions to machines. I own the machine, hence I want a say what it does. You are free to keep your intellectual property for yourself, if you want to.

The moral argument is that vertically integrated monopolies threaten the rights of consumers, who are human beings. Corporations are legal fictions and their "rights" are another convenient fiction to align incentives. They carry zero moral weight.

> especially as engineers who make their living by creating intellectual property and probably wouldn’t want to see control of it seized randomly

The premise of your question seems surprising.

1. In what sense the DMA enables seizure of control of intellectual property? I haven't heard of seizure being part of this.

2. In what sense DMA does so randomly? The DMA's rules seem to be written down, not random. Where are you seeing randomness?

Also:

3. One intention of regulation is that you don't want one (or a few) entities, regardless of what they are, to gain too much power over your citizens' lives. They want power to be distributed, just like to America's 3 branches of federal government were designed to distribute power. Could you explain what specifically you find difficult to understand about people finding it immoral to give a single entity too much power?

There are no absolute morals. But I think in general healthy societies are arranged around the ideas that people should have: the basics of living (housing, food, vacation, and some luxory), agency, and equal opportunities.

It should be clear that having a small number of companies murder all competition and personal freedoms (like doing what you want to do with something you own like a phone) are in contrast to these basic values.

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Or the alternative, more blunt answer: it does not require a moral justification. EU citizens directly elected the EP, the EP ratified the DMA. So Google can either comply or leave the EU as a market (which they wont do because it's too large and others would be happy to take it).

The moral argument is that private companies aren't elected and Google/Apple aren't supposed to have the power they have, they aren't government bodies.

They are 100% free to not sell to European customers

Are we still talking about massive companies with power to arbitrarily decide how billions of people use the personal computers they bought? Who's doing the feeling? Why would we presume all of their conduct to be moral?

> Party B owes you nothing. You are free to not use their products or start a company to compete.

When 99% of government/banks/etc require you to use a certain service to access basic services, you need some way of ensuring you don't have to sell your soul to use it. Alternatives would be really great, but Google is part of a duopoly.

Just because you build the rails doesn't mean you get to decide who gets to use the trains.

That is not their fault, though. I can see how you could complain to the people who mandate you use B’s products. Otherwise what you’re saying is that control of any intellectual property can be stolen from its owners simply by becoming popular outside of their control

> That is not their fault, though.

It is though. They are actively working on increasing their marketshare. That doesn't happen by accident. They have chosen to place the interests of the corporation over the interest of their fellow people. They are fine to do that, because we separated that responsibility. Corporations can only chase for profit, because we have governments, that make the rules, so that chasing profits is in the interests of the people.

Maybe you don't like that, and that is fine for you, although I don't like that you don't like that. Maybe you want a society where might makes right. However a lot of people don't feel that way, hence why we outsourced that world model to the government.

People don't like that their neighbor is stronger than them and takes there stuff, so they pay feudal lords. Then the feudal lords want some security, so they outsource that to elected emperors. After a while the feudal lords misuse their power, so parliaments are invented. Eventually people have enough and demand voting rights. The elected leaders betray the people by sending them to war, so they created multinational institutions, that try to prevent this (EU). They haven't used their power to betray the people enough, so we are still fine with them.

"Wealth comes with obligations" is literally in my country's constitution. You, may don't like that, but I do. I think a lot of other people do as well. It is of course always for discussion how much.

It kind of is their fault because of Google Play Integrity APIs. They are effectively developing tools that are designed to make their product mandatory. There wouldn't be a backlash that big if we could just unlock our bootloaders and run a patched version of Android.

> any [] property can be [taken by the state] from its [original] owners simply by [those owners becoming more powerful than the state wants]

When rephrased like the above, I think what you’re describing is pretty common in history. Many industries and assets have been nationalized when it serves the state’s interests.

IMO the moral justification is that there is no ownership or private property except that which is sanctioned by the state (or someone state-like) applying violence in its defense. In this framing, there’s little moral justification for the state letting private actors accrue outsized power that harms consumers/citizens.

Brutal, but understandable and well-argued. Thank you.

People outsource the brutality (to the government), so that they don't need to deal with it in their daily life. If we couldn't force companies to act in ways we want through a formal system, then the world would look much more brutal.

or alternatively we can just stop using products/services of said companies

I can ban persons from doing things, I rather not have them do. Companies are legal persons, so why shouldn't this apply to them? At some point ignoring behaviour is not making it go away, it needs to be actively worked against, otherwise it will become (practically) mandatory.

Which is why the more serious consequences a law has the harder it is to change it and the more people need to sign off on it. There is stuff that needs simple majorities, stuff that is in the constitution and requires a super majority, stuff that can't be changed short of abolishing the current state and stuff that can't be changed at all, because it is just an assertion that is independently on anyone asserting it.

This is kind of a "solved*" thing in theory, not so much in practice of course.

*solved meaning we have a proper process established

Not really stealing their IP, just putting limits on how much they can shaft their customers. If they don't like it, they can leave the EU, and others will take their place. It's like saying your company is losing its railway tracks if people of the wrong colour are allowed on the trains that run on your tracks. There's no need to get hysterical.

Party A enforces Party B's intellectual "property"

Party B has access to the market of Party A at Party A's mercy.

So you're saying that if I open a restaurant I'm free to poison the food and you can just decide whether to eat there or not and no government should be able to forbid me to do this?

Comparing blocking of malware apps with poisoning food is a type of dishonesty you probably recognized yourself when you typed it out.

The now deleted comment I replied to was against all sort of regulation, saying that the market will take care of it.

party B doesn't have "intellectual property" except by the dictum of party A, what is party B's problem, why would they make party A do that?

Google is engaging in immoral business practices. Since they are immoral, it is morally justified to say they must be stopped.

> how would you feel if you were on the receiving end of such a dictum?

I continue to be astounded how people still just flat out assume that everyone must be a capitalist.

If I were on the receiving end of a dictum aimed at stopping immoral behavior, I would cease my immoral behavior. But I'm not going to be on the receiving end in the first place because I don't aim to do immoral things in the first place.

My moral justification is that my right to do with the physical property I have in my physical hand is more important than any noncorporeal corporation's right to do anything with their noncorporeal intellectual property.

The truth is, I gave party C money for a product. Party B does not get to say anything about what party C gave me. And they absolutely do owe me something, and that is the use of the product they gave me for my money. Whatever their terms of service say about licensing versus owning should not trump the fact that I made a one-time purchase and I have physical ownership that they cannot revoke. This is not a car lease where I have a contract with the dealership and they can reposses the car if I don't make the payments.

And you can use it. You can, in fact, keep using the software that shipped on it. What you want is access to further intellectual property they develop (updates, features), that just so happens to be able to run on your hardware and ability to shepherd it in a direction you want and they don’t.

> that just so happens to be able to run on your hardware

the hardware is specifically locked down with "trusted computing" features to facilitate this. It's not a random coincidence. The problem here lies in the network effects and the use of trusted computing. If my bank app mandates that I use "real deal 100% certified android", then I can't just develop my own OS. So it's an antitrust situation.

If every company in the world teamed up with MegaCorp and made their services contingent on wearing a MegaCorp shock collar powered by trusted computing, would you wear it? You are free to not use the collar... and starve to death in the woods I suppose.

I don't usually even care about intellectual property. It's a hack to grant a temporarily exclusive monopoly as a way to incentivize R&D. The R&D in this case is just solving the question of "how do we establish a larger monopoly". So why should the public be forced to uphold it?

Asking me if I am willing to violate intellectual property in this situation is like if I was being lowered into a pit of liquid hot magma and in order to get out I had to break the flag code or jaywalk or something.

> And you can use it.

Tell that to the locked bootloader.

> What you want is access to further intellectual property they develop (updates, features), that just so happens to be able to run on your hardware and ability to shepherd it in a direction you want and they don’t.

Well yeah, I am paying them with money (and data) and thereby with power and expect them in turn to provide directions for my device, so that is does what I want. That's kind of the deal. If they don't want to provide that, then they can just not accept my money (and data). They can of course produce devices, that to what they want, and want me to carry them around, but then they better pay me.

If they use the power I gave them against me, then I will demand my power projection as a service provider (aka. the government) to project power in my interest.

I'll gladly take that trade, either: - They lose the right to their "intellectual property" and I'll accept that they owe me nothing. or: - They continue to enjoy "intellectual property" protections granted by the state, but the state subdues them into actions which are for the benefit of the public.

I'd be happy to make that offer to any of the parties that build closed ecosystems, but none of them will take the offer since closed ecosystems are almost always built with the intent of misusing the copyright system to create a state-enforced monopoly and bloodsuck value produced by real economic activity.

The moral justification is the same anyone else employs. I have a tool to create an outcome and I'm going to use that tool to produce that outcome. It's that simple.