cropr

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cropr
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  • Apple must pay EU $14 billion over Ireland tax arrangement

    croprcropr
    The title is misleading:  Apple must not pay the amount to the EU, but to the Irish government.     The court has decided that the reduced tax rate  must be considered as illegal government aid to a private company.  This illegal aid must be reimbursed to Ireland.    

    muthuk_vanalingamh2psphericJFC_PALettuce

  • Apple tweaking how default browsers are selected in EU

    croprcropr
    ssfe11 said:
    What a waste of time by the clueless EU. People realizing this thats why Vestager has been fired. 

    Is she? The  new EU commissioners for 2024-29 period still need to be decided
    williamlondon

  • Apple tweaking how default browsers are selected in EU

    croprcropr
    spheric said:
    This is total nonsense, why does Apple need to promote competing products to this ludicrous extent. I don't remember any other product or OS that has to bend backwards this far. 
    You've been on here since 2008. 
    It's hard to believe that you completely missed the whole Microsoft/Netscape thing. It was kind of big. 

    https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_13_196
    I do, but Microsoft owned over 95% of the computer market and wanted IE to be the only browser in the market, including the Mac. Today the most popular browser by far is chrome. Very different dynamic 

    You missed the point. Apple is considered as a gatekeeper for the iOS ecosystem.  And gatekeepers must provide by EU law a fair playing field for iOS app developers.  So this is about the rights of the app developers, not about the market share of the end users.

    By the way, I think that in 2024 the market share of Safari on iOS is very similar to the market share of Internet Explorer on Windows back in 2008

    nubuswilliamlondon

  • Fortnite coming to iPhones in the EU via AltStore

    croprcropr
    AppleZulu said:
    Let’s hope this scheme is a colossal failure. 

    I mean, if someone built an inviting “alternate app store,” it would ultimately not qualify for Epic’s distribution terms, because any quality app store would have to charge for its services. Quality isn’t free. 


    You listen way too good to the Apple Marketing machine. 

    Setting up a quality, secure app distribution system is not really rocket science and can be established in a very cost efficient way.    I've done it for an set of apps (mainly Windows and MacOs apps).  The cost of such a distribution system is mainly driven by the volume of downloaded bytes, not by the value of the apps.   And we are speaking of a few cents per GB of downloaded data

    muthuk_vanalingamwilliamlondondewme

  • Google gives up on Chrome plan to ditch third-party cookies

    croprcropr
    Pema said:
    An obvious decision. Money first $$$

    Google has one thing and one thing only going for it on the revenue front: Search. 

    Android doesn't make money and every hardware effort has been buried the Google Graveyard now numbering 255 headstones. 

    If Google blocks third party cookies it's cutting off it's nose to spite it's face. Never, ever going to happen. 

     :D 
    Not fully correct.   The Goolge search service as such is not impacted.

    If cross sites cookies were removed, the advertizers that use that cookies to track the user are directly impacted.   This would lead to a situation where
    • The user is no longer tracked by these advertizers
    • The user is tracked by Google as before (using a different technique)
    • The ads presented to the user are more generiic and no longer targeted according to the user profile, unless the advertizers are making an agreement with Google, which still has access to the full user profile data.
    • these advertizers are thus more dependant on Google if they want to show the same ads to the user.
    So the power of Google would increase.   Because Google has a market dominance in search, its own ads business revenue would see an increase. 

    As a consequence the advertizers complained. The EU commission is very susceptible for such complaints and has indicated this could be leading to a heavy fine for anti-competitive behavior.

    The same logic did not apply to Apple when the cross site cookies ware removed from Safari, because Apple did not have a relevant ad business
    gatorguymuthuk_vanalingam