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Yes, exactly! Also forced EU voters to consider how much they value these services, and whether the regulations are worth it not to have them, or to have watered down versions of them. I say this without judgment - I see it as a legitimate area of consideration.

I think the worst is hugely impactful laws for which exceptions are constantly carved out so nobody can truly evaluate whether the law/reg is a good one or not.

That's not exactly how I would summarize the current moment in time.

This OP article doesn't really go into it, but they did actually propose a solution to the divide, they just needed more time to develop it. The Reuters article is reporting on one person's response to the proceedings, which involve more details than this particular article covers.

For instance:

> To address those concerns, Apple designed a system called Trusted System Agent, an intermediary that would let competing virtual assistants safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI on EU devices. Apple also proposed launching Siri AI in Europe while rolling out the Trusted System Agent gradually over 18 months. The European Commission rejected both proposals, and according to Apple, did not agree to any alternative.

https://thenextweb.com/news/apple-siri-ai-eu-dma-delay-ios-2...

> While I like a lot of Euro regulations, some of the privacy ones go too far with the whole "we're going to enforce this on the whole world" crap.

Care to explain? EU is also a jurisdiction, so why would EU law be legal in other areas than EU?

And as a consumer, I am somewhat happy that a company says "well, then not" if it cannot comply with the law.

If the law makes sense, that I cannot judge in this case.

Yes. If a company in another country elects not to deliver a product or feature because of local regulations, consumers should take that up with their local legislators. That company has no obligation to sell something just because local consumers want it. And if those consumers want to bypass local regulations in some manner, that's their business.

Totally agree. Granting exemptions feels like trying to have their cake and eat it too. If regulations mean anything they need to be enforced so we can see the real downstream effects.

> I want more companies to not get exemptions and thus not offer law-breaking products. I LIKE that the government is saying, "fix it or don't bring it here" and Apple just has to live with it.

The idea that there is such a thing as "law-breaking products" when consumers ACTIVELY CHOOSE TO SPEND THEIR MONEY ON THEM is insane to me. This is authoritarian nonsense.

It is not the state's place to tell people what they should or should not be allowed to buy.

You should remember that according to a court testimony the whole European area (which goes beyond EU) gives Apple 7% of their revenue, whereas breaking DMCA may incur penalties of ups to 10% of global turnover.

Those numbers make withholding "risky" products a no-brainer strategy. Also, those numbers put a hard limit of how much Apple will want reevaluate their general strategy of tightly integrated first-party software.

To me that reads as an even greater reason not to delay it. If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them. Waiting until post launch now means a massive amount of re-engineering.

I know it’s not quite as simple as that but I do think it shows Apple are more interested in blaming the EU than reducing the potential issues ahead of time.

Okay? I don’t see the problem, these requirements are known from the beginning so if complying wasn’t planned and requires re-architecturing the software to make it happens that’s on the engineering org not on the EU regulator. Unless I’m missing something?

The point isn’t that it’s easy or straightforward to do. The point is that one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets.

> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc.

Maybe the phrasing is unfortunate, but if compliance to the law requires a “redoing”, launching in that market was never a priority in the first place. That’s a completely legitimate choice, but usually companies whining about regulations are making a financial decision rather than an ethical one.

There wouldn't need to be a redo if the products had been built with compliance in mind. This law isn't something new; it's been around for years now. Not taking it into account from the beginning with the intention of operating in the jurisdiction means there's definitely intention to skirt. Particularly given the previous issues in the same department.

It’s not an enormous effort if you plan for it. They clearly knew about this, and could’ve afforded to plan for it. Their whole shtick is locking users in, and DMA is their nemesis.

> completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc

So Google chose to be evil, now they have to rip all the evil out and redo it from scratch. Can't say I have any sympathy. Should have done the right thing from the start.

Yet Gemini had no issues to comply with EU's DMA and release on all phones?

Let's call it how it is: Android phones allow every competitor to run their chatbot in place of Gemini. Want Perplexity instead of Gemini? You can have it. Samsung launches with Perplexity as of late.

Apple? As always, went into "ay mate, too integrated, can't give the same APIs to competitors" lame excuse.

Why does systems are not designed take into account that compliance work?

You're essentially saying that privacy violations are baked into the cores of these systems.

The truth is very often that it is long and hard not to do the work to comply but how to not comply or do complicated things to abuse of loophole despite being able to pass the law on the letter of it.

Especially in the case of apple or Google. Look at the app store situation. It is very straightforward to do the work for the whole thing to be open to any competitor. But it is hard to try to design and implement a solution to try to not break any regulations but still manage to keep users captive the maximum without having competitor entering our walled garden.

Meta research eng here

Yes, but also its much cheaper to build it in at the very start.

When we built pervert glasses research platform, if we'd just ignored the data privacy laws we could have built it much quicker. But, the only reason it took extra time is because

1) we had no idea what we were doing and

2) the lawyers had even less idea, so we had to do a bunch of reading and make a best guess.

Turns out the guesses were right, but it was painful getting the lawyers to understand.

It's also not a "two-pizza team" market.

So, what are the chances they'd completely redo multiple core systems in the 18 months they asked for?

> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.

Then you should have done it right the first time.

Exactly, and the prupose of these legislation was supposed to be exactly that : force companies to integrate privacy in the core of their products, not to create a list of items to tick.

I have a crazy idea: design the product with compliance in mind already!

Agreed, unless you specifically know how a regulator will interpret a broad requirement on a edge case it’s a lot of effort to even figure out what the plan is, much less implement it.

> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.

What if I tell you that there's a surprisingly simple, straightforward and above all very cheap solution: don't implement privacy-invading or anti-competitive features in the first place ;)

LOL, do you think Apple learnt about the requirements yesterday during the presentation?

Well if your product wasn't already basically spyware, it wouldn't be so much work to abide by privacy regulation frameworks, now would it? I have no sympathy for how hard it is for surveillance companies to adapt their exploitative business model to the EU.

So? It's also more effort to work everyday to earn a living than simply stealing what you need from your neighbors at gunpoint. But the law's the law.

As a European I'm conflicted because I think this particular set of privacy laws are overreaching bordering on stupid; but "exemptions" for one of the richest corporations on earth would be beyond absurd and infinitely worse.

Privacy by design isn‘t enormous effort, as every European engineering manager will tell you. It‘s just another reasonable and straightforward set of requirements. Of course, if you want to have privacy-less features in jurisdictions permitting it, that‘s a different story and that‘s a choice.

Wow, Google must be a poster child for privacy then.

>These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.

And yet Apple had no major issues complying to the draconical demands of the CCP to sell and operate there. Weird.

Also, it's not like Apple can't afford the manpower for this. They're not a hole in the wall mon & pop shop.

[dead]

It goes to show that privacy is not a priority. And it should be.

Also it does not matter what you do in the end. If you are Big Tech the EU will sue regardless and always finds an excuse.

In this case it looks much simpler: Apple strictly does not want to open up the iOS platform to other competing agents, as they lose the monopolistic moat if they do. While making a true developer platform with good documentation is often hard and expensive, with the market access they'd get, companies would gladly jump on it even if it was badly documented as long as they have guarantees of continued legal access.

At the same time, this potentially opens up the entire worldwide market (imagine EU iPhones being imported into US to use with OpenAI or Claude Cowork), and they probably made the estimation that keeping EU out is still better value (70% of the market all to themselves) than fair competition in the 100% of the market (I guess they estimate they might get less than 70% in that case).

Or they are hoping that EU customers will want Siri AI enough to campaign for a change, but I'd find that highly unlikely.

Those requirements are explicitly on the outcomes because companies like Apple used to abuse loopholes in previous, non-outcome defined laws. They, as always, have no one to blame but themselves.

A lot of regulation is legally defined in terms of outcomes. That in itself isn't unusual. Checklists of technical requirements are almowt always a derivative and a suggestion about a safe path to meet the regulated outcome. This is how "blessed" standards for e.g. medical devices work. This shields the laws themselves from overly technical discussions.

The only difference that I can see here is that the standards layer hasn't solidified yet.

That is fundamentally how EU law works

The intent matters, not the letter of the law. No loopholes, no bad faith interpretation. Just do what the law wants from you, if you make a mistake in good faith, you'll be given leeway to fix it.

> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...

> but instead navigating the worst case scenario of enforcement if post-launch the EU determines that the proscribed outcomes aren’t being met

This is true of most things that involve legal. Laws are not code, in basically any jurisdiction they are subject to interpretation, and just because you've dotted your Is and crossed your Ts, doesn't mean an enterprising enforcement agency won't still come after you

EU laws are written like this to give companies maximum freedom in how they implement their solutions, not to lay traps for them to fall into.

Apple might not want to risk 10% of their global revenue on whether EU regulators like the outcome of their compliance efforts. And there isn’t any real risk of an EU based startup competing in this space like there would be in China.

> Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?

Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy.

In another regulatory area (not privacy, but something more historically regulated) we ran into strange situations where complying with the letter of the law would require us to walk back things that we had done in a better way. The laws are not simple and they're not written by engineers or even people who understand what future product needs look like.

The exemption Apple wanted was not from a privacy law, but from the DMA. They never claimed to have an issue meeting their privacy laws when using their own product, it was other people's products that they said they couldn't guarantee the privacy of.

Here's their argument in their own words: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...

No, this isn't the claim.

EU wants Apple to open 'Siri AI', with access to a personal context, open to other model/AI providers.

Apple says "We can't do this in a privacy preserving way".

You can definitely question what their true motivations are, but it seems pretty plausible that there is a moral case for this system to not be opened up to other providers who may do a worse job at privacy than Apple (especially when you are Apple and you trust yourself).

I think there is a place in these sorts of ecosystems for privileged players. If you buy an iPhone you implicitly must trust Apple to some degree.

>But Apple's position here is actually really wild: Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?

The DMA isn't a privacy law. In this case, the DMA would appear to require Apple to open up all user data to any AI agent. That removes the ability to provide privacy protections.

You can argue Apple should do that, but you can't in the same breathe argue for privacy.

Lemma 1: you want to protect your users privacy, and are also beholden to regulation enforcing that commitment (GDPR).

Lemma 2: you are obliged by other regulation to offer equal access to user data to third parties, so others can build equivalent functionality (DMA).

Lemma 3: malicious third parties will absolutely try to abuse the access and trick the user into sharing their data by all means possible. You will be held responsible in court of public opinion at minimum and legally at maximum if/when a malicious third party abuses said access.

This is a hard, possibly technically unsolvable problem no matter how much money you might have, because the root issue is not technical, it's the fact that you legally have to give third parties access and no way to control what they do with it - and as others have mentioned in the threads, it's exacerbated by the fact that the regulation doesn't say "this is okay and this is not", it is vague and judges things "by outcome", so you may spend all the time in the world implementing a solution you think will work, and then get hit by fines/lawsuits because the implementation is judged as not sufficient after the fact.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, DMA isn't a privacy regulation. It is simply about competition. You can be in 100% compliance with DMA and poor privacy protections. This is the crux of the problem. How do you preserve the privacy of your customers while complying with regulations where the simplest path is to compromise your customer's privacy?

The issue here isn't EU privacy laws (which Apple has been historically quite good at complying with, by big tech standards); it's EU _competition_ laws.

> Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws?

The DMA and the GDPR are laws that at their core make each other more difficult. the stated outcome of the DMA - allowing any vendor/user full access to your device - is not easily supported when solving for privacy.

There’s a difference from being able to protect privacy, and doing so in a way that complies with EU law

Protecting user privacy and reducing surface area for litigation against the business can happen simultaneously. Not that it is, but just saying, politics and difficult to define thresholds muddy the waters.

Apple is providing a level of privacy far beyond what the laws require. It would be easy if they only wanted to comply with GDPR and DMA.

Letting a US company (under jurisdiction of, say, US Cloud Act, but also unknown administration orders that might come) strictly control the phone for a privacy focused EU citizen (or more broadly, non-US citizen) seems super dangerous.

The requirements are not onerous, it is the basic preemption of monopolist behavior.

Qualifying "random apps" is something that is a true challenge, but that holds regardless of the API being offered — the problem is that Apple saves some programming API only for themselves, instead of introducing acceptable & objective market terms to be met (if deemed unsafe, they could require companies to demonstrate compliance with things like CRA to get access to these APIs).

Don’t install the app then. Consumer protection at some level means the consumer needs to be informed. I’d rather have a choice than just chow down on whatever the gatekeepers call food.

"Onerous requirements": users have the right to chose, users have the right to privacy.

> Opening up all access to control the phone to some random app the consumer installed seems super dangerous.

Do you never install software on your desktop computer?

True hacker spirit here.

Indeed. If they really cared about privacy, they would end-to-end encrypt iPhone backups by default. But since they don't, US law enforcement can request my iMessage chats because the people I talk to (probably) do not have ADP enabled (which enables end-to-end encryption for backups).

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Well, whatever the real reason is, people do appreciate things they have to work for more than things given for free.

I’m not saying I believe that’s the real reason here. But it is broadly true. Ask any company that offers a free tier where most of the complaints and problematic customers come from.

It sounds like the work on the privacy layer was significant and to give "equal" access to other competing AI systems, they would need to include that "for free" as part of the platform. Or they could try to keep that as the moat for Siri AI, and only offer privacy "entry points" that other agents can tie into, but vendors would have to implement privacy preserving functions themselves.

This is the bit that's likely hard, because generally keeping safety and privacy guarantees as data flows through the system is extremely hard, and Apple would not be able to guarantee it for other products without large review investment.

But ultimately, they probably just do not want to do it until Siri AI gets a decent marketshare first, so competing agents would have to both build new solutions for the platform once open, but also deal with an incumbent dominant player already on people's phones.

Please don't post bombastic, inflammatory comments like this on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

The technical problem is nothing like exchanging data with fitness trackers.

One of the issues here is that there are many people with strong opinions that don't understand the thing they have strong opinions about. Which is the normal state of human affairs.

> It would only be a backdoor if it's implemented as a backdoor.

You don't seem to know how backdoors work.

Oppressive regimes mandate that tech companies pre-install apps to protect people from spam calls, or install specific root certificates so they can intercept your traffic and insert a helpful banner into your browsing session to remind you when to pray.

The EU isn't going to ask Apple to add DataCollectionBackdoor(). They are going to demand that in the spirit of freedom and happiness EU companies must have access to Apple users private data.

What?

You want Apple to anonymize a users data, then hand that users data to a third party who knows who the user is? I don't think PCC is doing what you think it's doing.

I have never seen this argument against (admittedly I'm not big into such debates) right to repair, did it came up somewhere?

The hypocrisy is easily explained by the overall attack on ownership... you dont own your own data. you dont own your car, your phone, your pc. Everyone wants to own all your stuff...

The Mac is a pre-existing platform that is both more capable than iOS, and had an existing user base that used apps that had much greater access. Apple’s attempts to lock down the Mac have met with poor adoption.

In exchange, it also less secure, less user friendly, and less popular.

There's SIP. Claude can't install kernel extension and you can. (... and it just hit me why Apple requires specific reboot procedure to disable it)

Laptops are a low security environment and already massively compromised. Thats why banks make you authorise transactions by approving them on your phone when you started them on the web.

Apple has been working for a while to secure MacOS but it’s hard without breaking compatibility with old processes.

There is no one-click way to install an AI model on macOS like potentially iOS could have. I can easily imagine some grandma install on their iPhone some random AI model they saw in an AI-generated Facebook post with just one tap.

It would either lead to Vista-style constant UAC prompts or having to give blanket access upfront (which would be abused).

What level of system access do they have? You can use 3rd party AI apps on iOS, they just can’t read app data or make actions on the system outside of the APIs that currently exist.

The new Siri has much deeper access to personal data and absolutely can not be trusted being siphoned off to a 3rd party server.

It’s a back door around normal app sandboxing and permissions systems. The security design of iOS was not meant to allow 3rd party apps to reach in and read any data from any app.

There is a 100% chance this would be used maliciously immediately. Meta would pressure users to install their meta AI agent, which would then go and read the users DMs, and create profiles on all the users who don’t even use Facebook by reading their data from everyone they talk to who did.

Personally I'd much prefer no siri access to app data than allowing evil companies like Meta/TikTok/Etc this level of access.

> Tell me which company in your opinion would be in the LOUD headlines, Apple or the random 3rd party?

The world I want to live in is not the one where apple claims responsibility for every byte of my data which passes through their products.

I think web browsers are a nice comparison here. Chrome added some nice security features (e.g. safe browsing) which are broadly a good thing for reducing harm from websites, but at the same time if you go to a dodgy website and they harvest all your personal details no one blames chrome for that.

No doubt AIs are an interesting use case because of the sheer volume of personal data involved, but if I want to trust some other AI app like gemini or chatGPT with my data then why should I be restricted from doing that?

Sorry, Apple has to be dragged, kicking and screaming to allow app store alternatives, that they charge offensive amounts for "to ensure your security" and has Draconian review rules on the App Store "to ensure your security".

Sure, 3rd party will get some shit. But if Apple neither protected me on their App Store _or_ on the app stores that they extort, what the fuck is their racket for? As long as Apple keeps this behaviour, they deserve to have their cornflakes pissed in.

yeah that must be why Apple is so careful about restricting access to the same data when it is synced onto a Mac oh wait they aren't

I can't find the problematic statement. Off course the tariffs are a threat to the financial success of German car manufacturers, and they need to keep their investors updated.

The DMA is also threatening Apple's high profit margins. That's the whole point of the DMA.

Such political statements never damage the brand for every citizen, but for some.

Tesla is a good example. Elon Musk became political and anti-EU, which resulted in an irreparable damage of the Tesla brand in Europe. Not for everyone, but a big group of people would never again consider buying a Tesla. As a result Tesla lost market share in Europe.

Apple seems to be on the same path now.

Well, let that be my concern. Why should I trust Apple more than let's say Proton?

Yeah, but you get to choose who gets to rip off your data. Joking aside, perhaps there would be some privacy focused alternatives and most importantly for Europeans, they would be hosted in the EU.

Isn't that ultimately the user's choice?

Apple could make settings for controlling exactly what is shared with the various assistants installed including Siri itself. No need for defaulting to full access.

Apple is not abiding, because they want to use time to really ensure they have the best assistant, before they allow competitors to build assistants for iPhone that can replace Siri (in the EU only probably)

Is there a way to downvote this comment? If Europe is so irrelevant in world affairs, then why is there a bustling discussion on this issue about who is in the right or wrong here? This is comment lacks good faith to argue against EU's regulatory power if this OP was going for

From the perspective of the user owning their own data and their own device, yes.

From Apple's strategy board point of view, no.

[this comment is not available to readers in the EU in compliance with EU law]

DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a US law. DMA is the Digital Markets Act, a EU law.

It is in fact an antitrust law. It basically argues (correctly in my opinion) that Apple and other companies have created new markets inside of their products. And in those markets they exert total control, including charging developers extortionate fees, forcing them to use their subpar and expensive payment systems or restricting what users can run on the devices they own & a lot of paid money for.

You're right, I was thinking of "slammed" as being part of take-down style news reporting.

Looking at Google Ngram, usage of "slams" started inflecting upwards in the early 90's and then even more strongly in the mid-2000's. [0] I wonder if that second increase represents the type of usage I had in mind.

(I looked at "slams" rather than "slammed" to try to avoid some of the other modern meanings, like being slammed with work.)

[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=slams&year_sta...

> the DMA sets certain requirements which determines whether features can ship in the EU

They can ship any feature they want, as long as they give users the option to choose alternative implementation of the feature.

> At a certain point the regulation is self-defeating. What is that point? This is the discussion that the EU lawmakers cannot acknowledge.

Because it's not self-defeating, what would that even be FAANG packing up and abandoning Europe? Worked out splendid for China.

[dead]

I’ll bite, why do you deserve this “right”?

AltStore works across the world, only in the EU it an Apple-approved storefront. Is it the total number? Also, is the number of store installs?

Interesting, I would have guessed the opposite as geoblocking is not perfect, unless it's using location services as well.

[dead]

I think OP didn't question the privacy of their Private Cloud Compute, just Apple's bad faith: they claim they can't handoff data in a privacy-preserving way to 3rd-parties when they tout that they absolutely CAN handoff data in a privacy-preserving way to their servers.

Apple frames this as a privacy issue when it's only a brand/control issue.

Europeans support that by and large. So either agree or have no ability to sell. This idea that companies know better about their users’ needs including privacy and choice is ridiculous. Apple is not a small company which is bullied as well.

> Apple probably doesn't want to lose 27% of their sales

They’re not going to over a single unproven feature.

Probably not, but it's still available. The DMA most likely would require the ability for users to be able to benefit from to the AI regardless of which email/photo/messaging provider they prefer to use.

> Apple could build it in a way that other model providers could safely and securely interface with the Spotlight index

How? How do you safely handover effectively every single bit of data on someone’s phone to any third-party company and preserve privacy?

Sure you can try and demand agreements from the third parties but will the EU see that as a move to limit competition?

Ignoring all other concerns it is a rather thorny problem.

I don’t think the EU would accept, and as a user I certainly wouldn’t accept, having to agree to a pop-up every time I used any feature that used any data on my phone that might go to a third-party AI.

I have the complete opposite experience. Originally had a Canadian bought iPhone in Spain, had all the features a Canadian has and a European doesn’t (or vice versa). Upgraded to a Spanish bought iPhone and I am still a “Canadian”. I’ve been here for nearly 5 years but my Apple account is still fully Canadian (Canadian address, Canadian credit card on file). I think it’s Apple account location, maybe with some sort of system to allow people to switch countries but not allowing that to bypass restrictions? Or: that’s why a EU citizen can’t just switch their account location to unlock features?

I don't think they were necessarily thinking of one EU-wide agency, but the recent attacks on encryption including Chat Control which almost passed, a lot of EU countries voting for far-right governments. I do believe we still have it better than in the US wrt privacy (e.g. we don't have Flock cameras), but we need to be careful considering what EU governments have been doing.

To do what exactly?

Apple does not adhere to EU law. It's their task to either go with the local law, or leave their customers hanging. And I rightfully express my disappointment that they currently do the latter.

Oh. Could not access the Reuters post.

> Apple thought that it was too risky of a capability to give to any random AI app right out of the gate

Oh come on. Apple doesn't want to give up control. That's what this is about. The privacy thing is just to make them look good

First they are not complying in China. Second it is sheer arrogance if not outright racist crap that China's demands are unreasonable but EU's reasonable.

Seriously EU folks need to come to down to earth sometime.

It's not launching in China either.

They are not complying with China’s demand either AFAIK.

But that does have to do with privacy.

Apple wants to implement features that access data locally. It doesn’t want to allow competition for offering those features, but if it did, competitors may use that access to local data to exfiltrate.

So it is about both competition and, as a result of creating competition, privacy.

Siri AI has the capability to read your screen and access a lot of personal stuff. I don't blame Apple for not wanting to open this up to allow any model to access it. It seems Apple proposed a number of solutions which were denied.

While I can appreciate the reason for the DMA, people don't have to buy Apple devices, they can buy any type of phone they want and just use the ecosystems provided by these phones.

We already have choice - people can buy many different types of phones. Nothing about this is about choice or the free market. They want special treatment.

Apple is free to do what they want. The EU can go and try and build their own iPhone (good luck with that).

Believe it or not, the eu is not one single entity with one undivided goal. As is perfectly well demonstrated by chatcontrol being proposed by one side and continually struck down by the other.

But AAPL has a big weight on the market/indices.

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Mistral is against these EU regulations. I bought a printed version of the AI act, it's 600 pages of absolute nonsense, with 5 mandatory committees on national, eu, company level; 12 steps 6 months processes to release a new features; daily reporting obligations to yet another committee. It's just not possible to release software with the regulations as they are written.

Honestly, it's probably more that Apple have been arguing about basically every single thing they are being made to do under DMA, amd the respective Directorate has basically no patience left for them at this point.

Never underestimate the power of a really, really, really irritated counterparty.

At the level Apple does, I mean broadly and their peers, there is not an European company at those levels.

Yep. Clash of priorities at a given time/deadline.

This one does not appear to be Apple being a dick, like they have been on the App Store and a number of other things.

Apple Intelligence was announced at WWDC two years ago, they had plenty of time to work on interoperability. Besides that:

access to all of your messages, photos, what's on your screen, browsing history, etc. Apple says hey so we're going to need some time to figure out if we can do that in a way that won't completely fuck over our users.

The point is that if Apple's model gets all that access, they should give others access to those APIs as well, otherwise they are giving themselves benefits over the competition. A company can do that, but not once they are considered a gatekeeper in the EU. It's up to the user to choose an LLM provider that has good privacy rules (or stick with Apple if there is no other provider). That's fair competition, a user can weigh pricing, privacy, etc. and make their own choice. Now they are stuck with Apple and have to get an iCloud+ subscription to fully use the AI features. The 18 month delay is not to figure this out, it's to entrench themselves as much as possible first.

Following your line of reasoning, if Apple had this behavior in 2010-2015, instant messaging applications outside iMessage wouldn't have the option to ask access to your contacts (privacy), no possibility to share a location in a chat (privacy), no means to show notifications (probably privacy too), etc.

It's surprising how much people are willing to do the bidding of tech oligarchs. Remember, this is the company that has spent years doing malicious compliance around the DMA and DSA, why should they be trusted this time?

Megacorps weren't always giants and it's not unusual for small companies to eventually become giants through excellent vertically-integrated products, and such companies would become subject to these regulations.

Interoperability is not free. One of the trades it brings is a notably lowered ceiling in terms of tightness and capabilities, and this persists no matter how many man-hours are poured into engineering the systems that enable it.

The Linux desktop is a great example of this at play. While it's technically worked for decades at this point, it's been a constant struggle to make it a high quality, thoroughly polished experience end to end and that's partly thanks to the unavoidable friction and gaps between layers that comes with interoperability and tens of involved parties.