> provides developers through ongoing investments in the tools, technologies, and services that enable them to build and share innovative apps with users around the world.
That's what the 99$ fee for the developer program is for. The 50ct Core Technology Fee is just Apple showing the middle finger to successful developers. I hope the EU goes after this fee first.
The whole reason for the DMA is that developers do not use Apple's platforms to bring apps to the user's devices.
The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.
Yeah this is what I really don't understand. They say they have to be compensated for their R&D work and for providing the APIs and cloud services etc. Okay.
They have to be "compensated" in the intellectual property[0] sense of "we reserve the right to invent new reasons why we need to be compensated". Nothing is ever truly "paid for" or "owned" here.
I’m not sure what % of their R&D budget comes from the $99 fee vs various other AppStore percentage based fees. But… should it be a flat fee? It seems sort of reasonable to charge more successful apps more, they are apparently benefiting more from the ecosystem, right? Like progressive taxation. (If anything, why not institute increasing developer “apple tax” brackets?)
It looks like, just from some random googling, Apple makes somewhere in the range of $85B per year from their App Store, and there are around 34 Million iOS app developers. Do people really want to pay north of $2000 for their developer licenses?
I think you'd be hard pressed to take the $99/yr they make from the dev program fee and use it to cover the salaries for the engineers implementing and maintaining all of iOS' developer-facing APIs.
Who decided that developers should be the ones paying for the development of those APIs in the first place? Are we just going to ignore Apple's own products and services that their platform allows them to profit off of? And the market share afforded to them by supporting popular third-party apps and services?
There's plenty of precedence for platforms being profitable even with free APIs - including Android, Windows, and even Apple's own MacOS. iOS is not special.
Apple would pay for those APIs whether or not the dev program fees alone were enough to cover the expenses. But they'll also take as much from the devs as they are legally allowed to. And if the fees are enough to keep devs from distributing outside the app store, even better for Apple.
Isn't having good apps/api a selling point for apple hardware (where they already make massive amount of money), why can't that be a motivation by itself?
and what about the devices itself? doesn't apple get money from selling iphones and ipads?
The only downside I see on the DMA is that it has come very late, and that it's only an european law. Mobile devices are computers, and once sold you should be able to install whatever you want like on any other computer. The shame on apple is that it is increasingly difficult to install software even on the computers.
Maybe Apple's goal is to become irrelevant enough to not be subjected to the DMA. I mean, making developers despise you is a brilliant first step towards such an end!
Why is size a question here? If apple is subject now, but then dropped to 1/10th the number of users, could they suddenly no longer be required to adhere to the DMA? Why is the size of the provider suddenly a test to determine if consumer protections are in order?
The DMA, digital markets act, is about fair competition, not consumer protection. If you got 5 users, you do not have the necessary leverage to matter.
> The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.
pretty much the same way nintendo or sony or microsoft justify it, I'd think.
it's pretty much exactly the same thing as windows S edition, or a console - you paid for the laptop, the developer paid to get notarization to release it. As Android shows, it is also probably legal to refuse to unlock the bootloader... now you own an "appliance".
And again, consoles have been doing this for two full decades now. PS5 isn't sold at a loss (and I don't think it matters if it is - your business model is not my problem) but I can't go mine crypto or emulate games on a PS5 or Xbox even if that's what I want to do with it as a user.
And I know that consoles got a specific carveout in the DMA "for some reason" (more evidence this is really just a bill of attainder in generic dress) but really there is not a moral difference here, and people have (including here, including the apple haters) have generally convinced themselves that it's OK. It's simple, just do the same thing with apple: "my phone is an appliance and I don't need to emulate games to be happy with it". It's a console in my pocket that makes calls.
In the EU, the spirit of the laws is what counts in court, not the letter of the law. That means it's a lot easier to understand things if you start with the intended consequences:
Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here
Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this
“The spirit of the law thing” is something I’ve seen repeated WRT the EU, but it seems like a really bizarre way to run anything important. The law obviously can’t tell us what its spirit is beyond what the letter is.
We can guess what legislators want… I guess a lawyer must have come up with this idea, because inconsistent guesses are going to give them lots of extra business.
Maybe it would be better to annotate laws with what their spirit is, so we don’t have to guess. In fact, just write that down instead of the apparently non-functional letter of the law.
You as a consumer or business cannot do the interpretation. Courts do. When there is ambiguities in the law (i.e. if the CTF is a valid fee or not), the higher courts (like the CJEU) decide how the law is to be interpreted and their decision sort of amend the word of the law.
> Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here
> Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this
this is a silly false dilemma/double standard you've set up.
if you want to apply the "do I need this exact device" standard - then no, you do not need a PS5, and you do not need an iphone. Therefore there is no need for regulation.
if you want to apply the "can I live my life without this whole category of Thing" - you probably can't live your life without some form of entertainment, and some form of generalized computing device, right? So no, you can't "do without" something like a PS5 or a phone or a laptop, no.
And the Xbox and PS5 are general purpose computing devices - there is no technical reason you shouldn't be able to check emails or run a word processor on your Xbox, other than that's not the market segmentation MS wants. Again, this is an example of a device so successfully convincing people that it's really an appliance that literally the EU wrote it into a law that there's no need for this appliance to comply.
Again: what's the problem? Just do the same thing with the iphone.
regardless, you are choosing to ignore the whole point about Windows S - you certainly can't life your life without Windows or MacOS, right? And if you want to point to niche solutions... nobody is stopping you from buying a Sailphone, but you would probably agree that's not a sufficient solution for the market as a whole.
Again, the whole thing is very narrowly a bill of attainder, both in its written form and application. If the purpose is "protecting consumers" there is no logical reason to exclude Windows S or PS5 or Xbox or other general-purpose computing devices from being utilized as such by consumers.
The EU has no business to be declaring these classes of devices as having no need to comply with market act requirements, especially when the boundaries are so fuzzy. Apple TV is pushing into mobile gaming. Series S is pushing downwards into mobile gaming. What is the difference between these 2 classes of devices, why should one get a pass? Why should Motorola be allowed to refuse to unlock their bootloaders without voiding a warranty? Etc etc. Literally narrowly targeted at ios and nothing else - even when it would benefit the consumer.
And more generally people are deliberately (and knowingly) missing the point that these types of appliances are common and are widely accepted - literally so widely accepted that the EU wrote special permission for many of them. Phrasing it as if Apple is somehow uniquely denying users access to the capabilities of their hardware is incredibly misleading - literally the EU wrote into the DMA special permission for many vendors to continue denying their users access to the capabilities of their hardware.
But, it's apple, I get it, everyone hates apple. But at a technological level they're not special or different.
Everyone knows the problem has nothing to do with openness or whatever, but that it comes down to the 30% fee and companies not wanting to pay it.
The problem is the law isn’t written to say “30% fees are too damn high” and just mandate that the fees can’t be over X% or are capped at $Y per install/device/whatever.
Game distribution
Steam 30% (25% after $10M, 20% after $50M)
Epic 12%
Humble 25% (15% to Humble, 10% to charity)
GOG 30%
Console
Microsoft 30%
Playstation 30%
Xbox 30%
Nintendo 30%
Mobile
Apple 30%
Google 30%
Physical
Gamestop 30%
Amazon 30%
Best Buy 30%
Walmart 30%
I am really impressed how much time and effort Apples legal department spends to find every single loop hole in the wording of the DMA. The 50ct per install for alternate app stores, 50ct per install for non-App Store apps after the millionth install, 1 million dollar in securities for alternate app stores, etc all follow the words of the DMA, but not the spirit. I am really interested to see the European Commissian drag Apple in front of a court and them having to legally defend their actions. I assume that all of those things they are setting up to circumvent people from using their rights will really blow up in their faces.
The EU has always been enthusiastic about the spirit of the law, and Apple is not used to this. You can see their temper tantrum unfold every time they find this out.
Is it? Developers used to determinism in software frequently don't understand that in all jurisdictions the law is ultimately interpreted by humans. I've been going through some legal processes myself, and my friend who is a lawyer reminded me more times than I care to admit that this is the case.
In the US, SCOTUS's job is literally to interpret the spirit of the law in the event of ambiguity.
Developers are fully used to this ambiguity and "spirit of the law" when interpreting standards. Search for WeirdNIX (popularly known as Windows NT and other names too).
There's different ways to interpret laws for courts. One of them is called teleological interpretation where you follow the intent of the law. For this courts also look into the documentation the legislation provided when defining the law. This is usually not done by lower courts, but courts like the CJEU use those when the letter of the law is unclear to define this for the lower courts to follow.
The situation in the US seems to suggest that trying to finely analyze the exact sequence of words in a law or the consitution still leaves a whole lot of room for arbitrary decisions. Abortion was a constitutional right until it wasn't and the constitution was not changed between.
All language carries inherent ambiguity. However, developments in American constitutional law aren’t really about that. The Constitution is very general and it uses terms that lack an objective meaning (for example, “Due Process” - what counts as “process”? What process is “due”?) It can’t really be implemented without bringing in a pile of philosophy and policy making.
At the same time, SCOTUS has been guilty of stretching its terms to include ideas that are clearly out of scope. (For example, the dubious invention of “substantive” due process - which all of the abortion stuff hinges on.)
Of all the examples you could've brought up and you thought a person's right to control their body is a stretch? Try "qualified immunity" if you want an example of justices reasoning with their bare ass showing.
Also, substantive due process was not invented for reproductive rights. It was invented in Dred Scott v. Sandford, to prevent “free” states from depriving slave owners of their “property”.
"The phrase substantive due process was not used until the 20th century, but the concept arguably existed in the 19th century. The idea was a way to import natural law norms into the Constitution; prior to the American Civil War, the state courts were the site of the struggle. Critics of substantive due process claim that the doctrine began, at the federal level, with the infamous 1857 slavery case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.[11] Advocates of substantive due process acknowledge that the doctrine was employed in Dred Scott but claim that it was employed incorrectly. Indeed, abolitionists and others argued that both before and after Dred Scott, the Due Process Clause actually prohibited the federal government from recognizing slavery. Also, the first appearance of substantive due process, as a concept, had appeared in Bloomer v. McQuewan, 55 U.S. 539 (1852)"
While there is a trace of the idea in Bloomer, it is relatively faint. Dred Scott is much more commonly recognized as the origin of substantive due process. For example:
> We should note right at the outset some of the many remarkable facts about the case.
> * Dred Scott was the first Supreme Court case since Marbury v. Madison invalidating a federal law. Since Marbury created judicial review in the context of a denial of jurisdiction, Dred Scott might plausibly be said to be the first real exercise of the power of judicial review.
> * Dred Scott was the first great effort by the Court to take an issue of political morality out of politics. In that sense, it is the great ancestor of many New Deal and Warren Court cases.
> * Dred Scott was the birthplace of the controversial idea of "substantive due process," used in Roe v. Wade, in many important cases endangering the regulatory/welfare state, and in the recent cases involving the "right to die."
> * Dred Scott was one of the first great cases unambiguously using the "intent of the framers" and in that sense it was the great precursor of the method of Justice Scalia and Judge Bork.
I don't think it's controversial at all to say that substantive due process is understood to have its origin in cases like Dred Scott and Lochner, cases where the Supreme Court overrode the results of the democratic process to protect economic interests. Or, for that matter, that the court took significant license in "interpreting" the Fifth Amendment that way.
Also, I think many people are too teleological when they evaluate judicial doctrines and philosophies. "Reproductive rights are good, so let's find a way to justify substantive due process." Jurisprudence is part of a structure and process that is bigger than any specific outcome, and bad jurisprudence shouldn't be excused just because it leads somewhere we might like.
Maybe substantive due process links the two cases in the most nebulous and abstract way, but fundamentally Roe v Wade is about a person's right to control their own body (e.g., nobody can force me to donate a kidney even if I'm a perfect match), whereas Dred Scott was about the exact opposite.
Edit: I also disagree that looking at where judicial philosophies lead is a bad idea. At the end of the day, the judicial system exists for two main purposes: 1) enforce contract law and 2) enforce the moral zeitgeist in the most fair way possible. If an inflexible judicial philosophy is unable to keep up with the morals of the times, we should consider revising the judicial philosophy. I believe this is considered fairly mainstream legal philosophy, and a big reason "originalism" is considered basically a sham by the legal profession.
But that's the thing, when your law is legally binding in 24 different languages it's really impractical if not entirely impossible to have a system based on letter-of-the-law interpretations...
I’m so tired of this, instead of doing the right thing, Apple just keeps trying to brute force the legal framework. You don’t need fancy legal team to know this is not the way.
From a business point, I can totally understand what Apple is doing. Making this as painful and unpredictable (as a developer you never know if your app will be successfull and gain more than 1 million installs) is the way to keep developers using the old contract and keep them on the app store. This makes sense for Apple to find every loophole possible ...
As a consumer, and an Apple users, I want them to be slapped as hard as possible for how they implement this.
Funny how things go. As a consumer especially, but even as a developer I don’t want the DMA to succeed and purposefully want iOS to be a walled garden. It’s literally one of the reasons why I’m on iOS!
That's the nice thing about the DMA ... Nobody forces you to install a 3rd party app store, nobody forces you to install apps from websites, nobody forces you out of the walled garden. For you nothing changes. Those that want to use their 1000€ device differently than you now have the chance to.
As the “tech guy” in the family things might change actually.
(One of) the reasons why I like the walled garden is how it simplifies everything troubleshooting-wise. I have a few quirks to know, the rest is because of hardware failure and that’s it.
My peer not being tech-savvy might install stupid things from stupid places and it might be a problem.
The way it’s done it’s unlikely, but still it just complexify things for next to no reasons in my book. (Yes 30% is a lot; I personally don’t care, though I do recognize I’m a good position and I can afford not to–but then again, the most vocal about the 30% are not the most unwealthy…)
That's also solveable. For android you need to enable deep inside of the settings to allow 3rd party installs. Nobody is preventing Apple to do something like this. Or that you can create a profile that disables that setting that you can install on your familys devices. Nothing in the DMA prevents this.
Just because it makes your life easier as the family tech support is a pretty selfish reason to hope for a very good pro-consumer law to fail.
The way it’s going I’m actually pretty sure if they did that they’d get reprimanded…
Also it makes my life annoying when I open Safari and am presented w/ what can be told as the worst pop-up ever and have to spend literally minutes dismissing it for something I neither wanted nor needed. It’s the cookie banner all over again.
Does not seem like a lot, but as a developer I use devices in a factory configuration a lot, and it’s just as annoying as it’s useless.
Basically it’s the cookie banner again. Served no-one (at least definitely not the consumers), but annoyed a lot.
As for the “those that want to use their 1000€ device differently than you now have the chance to,” well……… nobody forced them to buy a 1000€ device did they?? They knew of the limitations; they had to, or they’re very dumb.
The law is not pro-consumer contrary to people say, it’s anti-garden, which is definitely not the same, and I’ll die on this hill.
Nearly no sites comply with the cookie-banner law, if they did, you wouldn't mind it.
It essentially says "Tell the user you're tracking them, give them a button to click not allow you to do that". If sites actually did that, I honestly couldn't care less about the extra second it would take to click "No, fuck off".
> Basically it’s the cookie banner again. Served no-one (at least definitely not the consumers), but annoyed a lot.
Oh no, you have to be given the option to not permit your data to be shared with ~1000 different partners with "legitimate" interests. Honestly, the only thing that is wrong with GDPR is that it came out too late.
Every time you dismiss a "we care for your privacy" banner, you're being made aware that your data is shared with hundreds or thousands of data brokers with "legitimate interest". The fact that vendors prefer to make your experience miserable rather than give up tracking is another example of "malicious compliance".
What happens is that you now have the right to request a copy of the personal information a site has collected and ask them to delete it. You can also sue them if they don't fulfil your request. You're welcome to exercise your rights as an EU citizen at any time.
> Also it makes my life annoying when I open Safari and am presented w/ what can be told as the worst pop-up ever and have to spend literally minutes dismissing it for something I neither wanted nor needed. It’s the cookie banner all over again.
Know what's cool? Firefox on android supports ublock origin. There are some chromium forks too with desktop extension support (on android). Funny what an open(er) market and easy of installing apps does, huh?
People (myself included) say the same thing about why they buy their tech illiterate relatives macOS computers. And it works. And guess what, it works despite Apple not getting a cut of every everything.
My girlfriend only install the handful of apps she wants both on her Mac and her iPhone and doesn't go back to the app store. She just put things on auto update. Most people don't fiddle with their computing device. And if installation steps are confusing, she just asked me to do it. I guess that's why Microsoft are enabling so many things on Windows as most users won't enable them by themselves.
That's neither here nor there for whether Apple has the right to insert themselves into every transaction on their platform and gets to decide which apps are allowed to exist.
And let's not kid ourself: Microsoft is enabling (and re-enabling and re-enabling and re-enabling) so many things because they are slowly turning their OS into spyware to make more money, not because they care at all about their users.
I'll re-iterate Cory Doctorow's quote: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit".
It's perfectly reasonable to create even more walled gardens than the Apple walled garden, once you open up for different markets. That's the beauty of choice.
I doubt it. "Walled" and "Safety" are getting confused here.
I think you like the App Store for its safety. You trust it, enough to be happy with it.
What does that have to do with wanting others to be denied alternatives? That deliver however much safety and different benefits that other people want?
If safety is one of Apple store's selling points, then competitive app stores will push Apple to deliver even more safety. Perhaps new forms of safety others pioneer. Apple didn't invent security or sandboxes. While also encouraging it to loosen non-safety driven (and therefore quietly non-customer friendly) restrictions on innovation.
For years Apple has placed deliberately crafted limitations on 3rd party apps that put theirs at an advantage. They've done anything but treat developers fairly. If they did, maybe this legislation was unneeded, but with the way they've been acting, it feels like a long time coming.
Until some apps are not in the App Store or a website is chromium-compatible only… Or that apps (e.g. youtube) outside the App Store is surprisingly more feature-complete than the equivalent in the App Store…
Don’t worry they’ll find a way to make it socially mandatory (the same way not having a google account nowadays seems impossible (I don’t personally but still do because of work for instance)).
And if you don't trust an app vendor without Apple's underpaid Chinese reviewers playing with it on an iPad for 5 minutes to guarantee your safety, then don't use those apps that pull out of the App Store. If YouTube or FB pull out of Apple's App Store and go to their own, Apple will have to cut it's hosting fees to get them back or lose that business and you'll suffer not because Google and FB pulled out of the App Store but because Apple pushed them out with exorbitant fees. You should want Apple facing that threat because it'll lead to lower App Store prices as developers won't pad a $5 app with $1.50 in extra cost to you to cover the exorbitant Apple fees. But you'd rather blame users who want to run what ever software they want on the computers they purchased than blame Apple's shitty business practices. That's on you, bud.
> And if you don't trust an app vendor without Apple's underpaid Chinese reviewers
This misses the mark so badly that it’s not even worth reading the rest.
App Review is based out of Sunnyvale and has more than 300 people that make on average $85k/y in their first few years, and mostly over $100k/y after three years.
Long tenured people, the ones that last more than 5 years and are advancing towards a decade of doing the work get close to $200k/y with some exceptions over that number.
Many of those 300 people are multilingual, some specialize in a specific language, but to expand and better serve non-English markets, Apple recently opened a branch in Ireland and one in Shanghai.
The latter mainly focusing on the Chinese market and the one in Ireland specializing in European languages and supplementing the English market.
Once again there are alternatives; nobody forced anybody to buy iPhones.
It’s not like Apple lied at any point saying “buy our phones and do whatever you want on them!” No. It’s clear. You do what they want. In what name should they be forced to “open” it to anybody?
What’s next? Force google to make their map data open? How would that go? It’s mostly the same thing.
To be blunt, Apple, Google, and other tech megacorps should be glad that we as a society allow them to exist in the first place, even despite growing to the size where they are clearly hindering free market (by actively blocking competition). Never forget that corporations are artificial entities chartered by governments; and nobody has a natural right to a corporate charter, so those can and should come with hefty strings attached.
I have no idea what your argument is here. That people shouldn't advocate for greater competition in the marketplace just because they already bought a phone?
It's not at all the same thing? Also there's a more apt comparison, which is forcing Google to make Android open and allow alternative app stores (oh wait, they already do).
App stores are a natural monopoly. An app store with more users attracts more developers. An app store with more apps attracts more users. It has a strong network effect and economies of scale. Natural monopolies should be regulated to prevent abuse by the first companies that capture wide market share.
> I am really impressed how much time and effort Apples legal department spends to find every single loop hole in the wording of the DMA.
Maybe this is an American trait, but I would be surprised at any company that wouldn't be doing this. A law has been made that affects our business: How do we comply with the law with as little impact as possible to us?
Some of the comments here seem to expect Apple to simply give up, as though a parent just walked in the room and said "You better do it or else."
If it's really the spirit of the law that counts, then the law should require no specificity. A simple "Treat everyone fairly, installs can come from anywhere" would be sufficient.
Perhaps it seems unusual, as Apple has so much technical control, an unusually extensive legal budget, and doing a very effective job of castrating any "threats" or as the EU might say "significant competition".
And Apple has the cash to play chicken with any potential fines if it comes to it, so its not hedging much if at all.
It is clear that the EU is going to have to get very tough, before Apple is going to proactively take into account any of the "spirit of the law" that the EU would like it to understand.
Theres literally billions of dollars of pure profit on the line here. Id be surprised if they dint do absolutely everything they could to keep the app store the way it is.
Being a complacent market leader may come back to bite them in the backside.
The world is getting more technical. People will demand openness. If I buy a product, I should have reasonable flexibility to use it how I want. Even if I break it, repurpose it or improve it, I want the choice to do so, just like I have with pretty much every other thing I own.
People will vote with their wallets if Apple refuses to open things up a bit.
Complying with what you guess at the lawmakers' intentions was/were is a fool's errand. The law is the text, nothing more, nothing less. That's the point of the law. If the law falls short or has loopholes, it's a bad law and it's the legislature's job to fix it, not citizens' to suss it out.
To assume the law means things that aren't written in the law is, quite basically, undemocratic.
The DMA is perfectly clear regarding its intention and context. Trying to split hairs to find wiggle-room in the text just so a gatekeeper can maintain the status-quo for a while longer is absolutely malicious.
Furthermore, Apple’s behaviour is quite discouraging for us EU based developers who actually understand and aspire to the EU’s values and what we consider “normal” treatment of the people using our apps and services.
Obviously Apple doesn't hold the EU's values in high regard (few people in the Bay or even the US do), so of course they will try to fight it. It's perfectly rational and even expected behavior.
And it's perfectily rational for the EU to take appropriate actions against companies that hold its values in contempt. Apple should expect that and temper their contempt accordingly if they intend on continuing to do business here.
Written it in another comment. If there are ambiguities in the written law, for example because the legislature did not specify in the text of the law, that you can't charge for the access to the platforms, high courts like the CJEU will take approaches where they determine the spirit of the law (i.e. by looking at the discussion material the legislature presented for passing the law) to find out what the intent of the legislature was and then defines this law.
This is for example how Germany now has a basic right to data protection. It's not written in the constitution, it was formed by our supereme court by looking at what the intentions of the author's of our constitution were. Same principle applies to EU laws.
I agree that this is not a citizen's job. That's why I wrote that I am very happy to see the EU commission drag Apple in front of the CJEU.
Personally, looking at the modern B&G devices[1], I find their UI pretty slick. Also super nice to get all needed information by just glancing at the display
Personally, I would not have a problem with paying for Facebook or Instagram without them abusing my personal data. But the 10€ they are charging is a ridiculous amount that is intended to drive users into opting to have their data used.
I doubt that Meta makes anywhere near 10€ per months with the ads they are showing me. If they can show realistic numbers how much money they own by showing me ads, I am absolutely fine to pay that with a 10% surcharge. I doubt this will be more than 5€ per month.
If you close a nuclear plant while a non-zero number of fossil fuel plants are still online, you don't care about emissions as much as you claim, regardless of what you replace them with.
With the ISDN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Services_Digital_Ne...) network, Germany had the most advanced digital switching infrastructure in the world. It offered two 64kbit/s lines into every household, and that in the 80s. Unfortunately, due to political decisions that were highly influenced by Leo Kirch and his commercial TV provider (Premiere), Germany's public telecoms infrastructure was a) privaticed into Deutsche Telekom and b) shifted to put copper TV cable into every household instead of fiber.
In east Germany, after reunification in the 1990s, Deutsche Telekom started to introduce a fiber into every home (OPAL - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optische_Anschlussleitung) but then they shifted their focus to DSL and reusing the old copper wires for telephone lines and abandoned this. No, not only abandoned. They opened up the streets again to lay new copper wire.
The worst thing is that this differs by state. In Hessen the communal IT provider (ekom21) offers the service to fill out the entire form online in a UI that resembles yours, but then you still have to go to the "Meldeamt" to sign it (although you do that digitally on a tablet there) because currently the "schriftform" (means: manually signed) is required. It might be changed in the future to be "textform" (means: must be written down) and then it can happen completely digitally.
Unfortunately, from the bigger cities I checked (Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Kassel, Gießen, Marburg, Wiesbaden), none of them used that service, only some smaller districts like Bad Vilbel[1] or Limburg[2] offer the service.
Yeah, I don't understand that the lawmakers in Europe have allowed this horrible situation to develop. Every EV charger should be required to just tap your credit card and start charging. I don't care if they also have their own cards with accounts and some sort of subscription *additionally*. But the accountless payment with just a card should definetly be a requirement on all chargers.
> Plus now, every german older household is forced to change their heater, at a cost of 500bn-1tn euros over the next decade.
This is also simply not true. You are not allowed to install new heatings that burn gas or oil. Wood pellets, heat pump, etc, all allowed.
If you have a working heating, nobody is forcing you to rip it out. You are allowed to have repairs if it stops working. If it completely breaks down, there is also possibilities to get exemptions if i.e. a heat pump is not feasible. Maybe take a look at the actual law and not what some media is trying to read into the law.
I don't know if the oil industry's astroturfing is absolutely amazing or if people intentionally don't want to understand, but I swear every single legal step taken towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels anywhere in the Western world is always filled to the brim with people misunderstanding what the law actually means.
But then it will lead to having less spare parts, less people learning the job of gas heater repair. You will kill the Market around Gas Heaters, you let the work force die and then you force indirectly people to move to heat pump. I have heat pump myself as long as solar energy, but I can see that even though it's true that nobody is forcing to, understanding how the market works, it is easier to see how it will be in the next years: We will just find people specialized in Heat Pump, it will be easier to install a new Heat pump than repair and maintain your older heater.
That's what the 99$ fee for the developer program is for. The 50ct Core Technology Fee is just Apple showing the middle finger to successful developers. I hope the EU goes after this fee first. The whole reason for the DMA is that developers do not use Apple's platforms to bring apps to the user's devices. The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.