Apple’s DMA Criticism Highlights Tech-Government Power Struggle
In a statement, Apple writes:
It’s been more than a year since the Digital Markets Act was implemented. Over that time, it’s become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU. It’s exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together. And as new technologies come out, our European users’ Apple products will only fall further behind. …
That’s why we’re urging regulators to take a closer look at how the law is affecting the EU citizens who use Apple products every day. We believe our users in Europe deserve the best experience on our technology, at the same standard we provide in the rest of the world — and that’s what we’ll keep fighting to deliver.
I struggle to offer constructive thoughts about Apple’s battles with the EU over the Digital Markets Act, a competition law aimed at boosting interoperability and limiting gatekeeper control. At a high level, I believe both the European Commission (which is responsible for the DMA) and Apple believe that they have the best interests of their constituents at heart. However, the European Commission views itself as serving all residents of EU member countries, whereas Apple is focused on current or prospective Apple users in the EU. Neither side is likely acting in bad faith; they’re advancing different, sometimes conflicting, mandates. As much as I believe Apple makes good products that serve its users well, what’s best for Apple users (and thus Apple itself) isn’t always best—or even good—for everyone else.
Apple’s claim of “the same standard we provide in the rest of the world” rings somewhat hollow, given that it often adjusts its technology and services to comply with local laws and rulings. The company has made significant concessions to operate in China, doesn’t offer FaceTime in the United Arab Emirates, and removes apps from the still-functional Russian App Store at the Russian government’s request. Apple likely pushed back (unsuccessfully) in less public ways in those more authoritarian countries, but in the democratic EU, this public statement appears aimed at rallying its users and influencing the regulatory conversation. Even in the United States, Apple dropped the Blood Oxygen app from watchOS to comply with the International Trade Commission’s ruling in favor of Masimo’s claim of patent infringement before coming up with an iPhone-focused workaround (see “Blood Oxygen Monitoring Returns with iOS 18.6.1 and watchOS 11.6.1,” 14 August 2025).
Ultimately, we’re witnessing a clash between two immense power structures—the European Union, a federation of 27 countries representing 450 million people and the world’s third-largest economy—and Apple, one of the world’s most influential and valuable companies, with a market capitalization of about $3.7 trillion and roughly $100 billion in net income over the past 12 months. As the power of the tech giants, whose products and services underpin the lives of billions, continues to increase, these conflicts will become more common, and it’s often impossible to predict which side’s vision will best serve everyone in practice.
Yes, it’s hilarious, in a sad way, that Apple is emulating Uber’s corporate strategy under Travis Kalanick. I don’t think it’s going to work, though, because Apple is too big, has too many stakeholders, and isn’t fighting an unloved, entrenched competitor—if anything, Apple is more like the taxi industry than early-days Uber— for “hustle culture” tactics.
I haven’t read up on the context of this story, but the Statement @ace quotes is corporate rubbish. I live in the EU and my Apple experience is not getting worse because of DMA but because of changes Apple makes to make their products better for Apple’s interests, not the user. Anyway, I could break down each of those sentences but the whole quotation makes me sick. Not unlike the ad where they literally hydraulic-press crush implements of creativity, or Google’s removal of avoiding evil as a corporate ideal. The people at Apple who approve this stuff are, ah, quite out of touch imho.
Right on, @ace!
Apple wants what is best for its business interests. The EU is an elected body representing a variety of constituents as noted by @ace too, and while I’m not a DMA expert I would say stories I’ve read about it make it sound like the EU is trying to protect consumers, a noble goal.
It’s about money, not The User Experience. That has been Apple’s approach if not always then for many recent years imho. Maybe I’m getting a case of Senior Cynicism, but in the early Apple days (I’m using Apple products over 40 years now) it felt like Apple wanted to do great things for its users.
I have quite a different perspective. As I see it, the DMA is demanding that every time Apple creates a new OS feature they need to provide ways for competitors to interoperate with it. (Which would essentially mean that they must allow others to copy it.)
Why would Apple, or any other company, spend millions to create something new under this requirement? In addition to the security problems this creates, jt adds millions of dollars to develop, test, and maintain interoperability, for the benefit of rival companies.
That’s one of the places where I just can’t work through where it all goes. Apple is complaining about having to jump through these hoops, but the fact that it’s doing so says to me that the cost must be worth the reward.
Apple could just as easily have kept such features out of devices sold in the EU, just as it dropped the Blood Oxygen app from watchOS in the US. But as big a market as the EU is, I don’t think that dropping certain features there would change Apple’s overall strategy—we’d just see different user experiences in the EU versus other parts of the world.
And that’s already true for many features, even high profile ones. Don’t take this ChatGPT response as gospel, but it gives a sense of how the Apple experience is far from standardized around the world.
LOL. I’m laughing, not in a malicious way, because Jobs was always focused on money, status symbols, and competition. The voice of the user was Woz.
I’d say that’s always been the tension at Apple: the hippie ethos of many of its early employees versus the capitalist-Master of the Universe competitive spirit many geeks strongly feel.
Well, the rest of the world is different from America. And somehow Apple manage to make a lot of money there. I wouldn’t worry about them.
And Apple users in the EU are doing just fine.
The damn cookie notice, well there’s that. Sorry folks.
Which is why there’s now an entire category of browser extensions to block the notices. Including:
(Curmudgeon-Mode)
I’m not defending Apple, but frankly I don’t think the EU is acting in good faith. I have great distain for Eurocrats, and for the EU as a pseudo-democratic body. When the EU Parliament gets ‘right of origin’, rather than ‘only votes on what the EU Council sends it’, I might change my position.
A lot of the EU arguments are for “competition”, but I don’t see the objective evidence where their ‘competition initiatives’ have actually -produced more competition-. The requirements for USB-C were particularly galling, because they were applied to devices that are mostly made outside the EU, but NOT to devices made within the EU. Case-in-point, I have a Braun electric razor, with a proprietary connector to the razor and a proprietary power supply (that produces voltage I think USB-C can easily provide.) And I have a Norelco, another proprietary connector, but on the other end was USB-A (and they included a USB-A dongle, something I have lots of already.) The arguments for mandating USB-C would apply just as well to EU produced electric razors as they would to US produced phones and tablets.
Many of Apple’s responses on App Store issues have been self-serving, but at the same time “It’s my store, I get to set the rules.” If EU wants to turn parts of Apple into a utility, let them do that with above-board legislation and the combination of carrots and sticks that apply to other utilities. Don’t do it with regulations promulgated by Administrative dictates.
(/Curmudgeon-Mode)
People didn’t like my post so I have edited it. The edits are in bold.
The EU and its member countries are in deep trouble. There are exactly no companies with a market value over $400 billion. There is no GDP growth. Companies are losing money or closing up. Energy costs are too high. Regulation costs are too high. GDPR is a joke which the EU is urgently working on dismantling as I write.[deleted] This DMA [deleted] will be brushed aside by the US with [deleted] ease [deleted].
As such the process of regulating and fining Apple is not really about Apple. It’s about financing the EU activities and catering to political forces hostile to the US. This has been going on for maybe a decade already, but these days the US government is directly responding negatively to these activities which is something the EU Commission is not sure how to react to.
It will be interesting to watch how this develops over time.
I think Doc Searls and others are working on for a long time a way for users to get more control over their data and permissions. I admire the effort and wish them success. If I recall right they propose a secure way for users to store their permissions, which would be accessed by websites before displaying the site, thus making it faster for users to browse in accordance with their cookie/tracking wishes.
When I visit US sites from a US location, I often find the only ‘choice’ (ha!) is to accept cookies/sharing/tracking or not use the site. Browse same site from an EU location and a variety of these options are presented, from ‘accept none’ to ‘essential’ to ‘all’. As a user I find this better than ‘our way or the highway’ but still not optimal.
Maybe, but I don’t believe for an instant that what you choose changes anything. It’s all window dressing.
As @ace noted, and as Apple has stated, they play by local rules around the world. There’s no reason EU laws should be a problem. Let them spend billions on compliance, not politics. They have and/can afford the engineering to deal with this instead of crying.
Is there a way to find out? ie, say I clear out a browsers cache and cookies and everything, then go to a site, click ‘reject all’, then see if the site stored any of the rejected data perhaps? Or is there some other built in diagnostic software that would tell?
You can check to see if they placed any cookies on your computer, but there is no way to tell what they’re recording server-side. Especially if the data is solely used for tracking and doesn’t affect the user experience.
A tracking cross-site cookie makes it easier to track uses, but it is far from the only way.
For example, they can use your IP address (which changes, but not that often) in conjunction with browser fingerprinting to generate a token that works pretty well for cross-site tracking, even if it’s not perfect.
You can, of course, use a VPN and configure your browser to make these techniques less useful, but that’s completely independent of various cookie laws. And if you are worried enough to do all this, you can easily block the tracking cookies yourself, independent of what you click on a web site’s warning box.
It’s quite routine in European countries (including the UK) for all or most legislation to originally be written by government civil servants, then it gets amended by legislators in (usually) two houses. In the UK this is the elected Commons and the unelected Lords, in the EU it is elected EU Governments and elected Members of the European Parliament.
UK MPs can introduce legislation, through a Private Members Bill system, but the system is rigged against them.
The US approach does tend to be different, but whether it is better is up for debate - I have the impression that legislation in Washington is more driven by $$ than the electorate.
Thanks, the edits help. While I may not be knowledgeable enough about the EU’s economic and political situation to evaluate your thesis, the argument that the DMA may have seemingly unrelated goals, such as revenue generation, political posturing for internal forces, and external negotiating points, doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Not unreasonable, but if you’re saying that the DMA isn’t really about Apple, the discussion does veer off-topic. We can’t and shouldn’t tackle global political issues that don’t at least intersect with Apple and the tech world, for madness that way lies.
Well Apple is getting drawn into the fray even if the EU’s “hidden motivations” are more complex. BTW have you heard of SetApp? They are developing an IOS store according to the new EU laws. SetApp is from Ukraine but located in Cyprus now.
The DMA became active in 2022 and the first fines were imposed in 2025, for a total of 700 million euros. The EU operating budget is about 170 billion euro/year, or 510 billion over the three years of the DMA. The fines thus constituted about 0.13% of that budget.* That hardly seems evidence of the DMA being an attempt at revenue generation.
*math not guaranteed.
(on a side note – I don’t root for companies for their market share rank, so I don’t think that’s really relevant)
Just want to add some context as we think about the issues in this thread:
The EU started fining Apple years ago before the DMA. This is just one area. And the EU has been fining many American tech companies. Google AI tells me the number is $15,000,000,000 over the last decade.
The discrepancy between the US and EU is huge, meanwhile the tech skill set (and other business skills too) difference between the US and EU is negligible. I do not believe this is a nuanced issue.
I would like to suggest Tidbits create a tracker of the differences between the features Apple ships standard and in other countries.
Taking that number as accurate, that works out to less than 1% of the EU’s operating budget over the same period. I’m still not seeing the revenue generation aspect of it.
Okay, we’ve established a broad framework for the amount of money involved in this context, so people can use that to decide what they think—no need for further discussion on this branch.
@Halfsmoke’s comments about market cap made me wonder why I chose that stat. I think it’s because, when we’re talking about the very top companies in terms of market cap, we’re using it as a stand-in for power and influence. The fact that the market (through stock price) feels the company is worth so much says something. The fact that market cap can vary is actually also useful, since if it wanes, that’s a hint that the company may not have the power or influence it once did.
But simultaneously, that’s also why I included Apple’s trailing 12-month (TTM) net revenue of nearly $100 billion. That’s almost incomprehensible and shows just how much money is sloshing around Apple.
Other interesting stats (courtesy of Yahoo Finance):
Yes, that’s a a massive amount of income, but 75% of it goes to running the business. Even without the R&D costs, it is expensive to manufacture and sell that much product.
It’s also interesting that they have a tremendous amount of cash, but nearly twice as much flows into and out of the company over the course of a year. Which means it’s not so much sitting on a hoard (as some like to claim), but is really more like a buffer to prevent reliance on short-term loans during the course of a year’s operations.
I would draw a difference between “drafted” and “tabled” (in the UK sense, to bring forward and place on the table.) EU Parliament has no ability to ‘table’ legislation. “drafting” legislation is a sausage-making process that often, if not always, involves groups of constituencies (also called “lobbyists” when you don’t agree with them), government experts, staffs of the individual legislators and of the relevant committees (at least in the US, ‘committee staff’ say for the Armed Services committee is separate from ‘member staff’ for each Member of Congress). All those contribute to the draft, bringing forward expertise, analysis, preference, impact analysis, etc.
Going to nitpick a bit here because Woz, though very “hippie” and user-focused, was a hardware guy and wasn’t involved with the Mac to my knowledge. The Mac had many other people pushing for stellar user experience, including people like Bruce Tognazzini, Larry Tesler, and Don Norman, and their influence lasted for decades. If the primary voice of the user was Woz, the excellent Mac user experience that lasted for such a long time would not have happened…
Yes, with the addition that the previous posts here are in reference to “the early Apple days”. Since Apple was founded in 1976, went IPO in 1980, and launched the Mac in 1984, my feeling is that the Mac-era began after Apple was a well-established company.
It is also a matter of different political systems views on economies. The EU leans heavily socialist with the socialist view of planned economies (one of the reasons for BREXIT) while these United States promote primarily free economy beliefs. Thus the EU wants to dictate to companies on how they run their business and design their products while US companies are rightly only minimally constrained by US government regulation.
If US companies want to business in the EU, they need to follow EU rules and regulations. When Apple kowtows to the Chinese dictatorship, nobody dares speak up. But when the EU, a legitimate democratically elected governing body, does what the US itself does just the same (you need to follow US law to do business in the US), people cry foul. That’s baloney. As an American that spent many years working and living over there, let me just say that in my book only misinformed/uninformed Americans think the EU is “socialist”.
Eh… no. It tends to varied forms of social democracy as a norm, all mixed economies in short. Quite a range of them across the continent at that. And accordingly the interests of the public factor into legislation which prompted this discussion. It has been a mixed bag for sure but that goes both ways. Look, having lived lengthy periods paying taxes, running a company and raising a family in both the US and the EU I see benefits to both approaches.
Thinking that the EU is socialist is only a measure of how far the center has been moved in America.
As an EU citizen living in The Netherlands, who has lived in the US in his teens, I can only say that I am glad to live in one of the happiest and wealthiest countries in the world. I think I can say we currently have more freedom in the EU than in the US. EU regulations are mostly aimed at fair competition, protecting employees, customers and the environment from big business solely focused on shareholders value, and are governed by democratic principles and processes. Calling that socialist is a distortion of reality. On average I think EU policies are a good thing for everyone living in the EU now, for the future of humanity and life on the planet in general. As things are now, I would not want to live in the US, I don’t even want to visit my family there.
As for Apple, instead of complaining about mostly fair regulations I would like them to focus more on the wishes of their users instead of dictating what Apple thinks is best for them. I still like using Apple products and really like how everything works together (mostly seamlessly) but I more and more start to dislike how Apple forces software updates (often full of little bugs), removes much used functionality and ignores feedback about bugs.
Very interesting point of view as always!
Here is a french interesting one too:
https://www.macg.co/aapl/2025/09/dma-pourquoi-les-iphone-et-airpods-sont-brides-en-europe-selon-apple-303933
I absolutely agree with you. The main target (behind a smoke screen) is to get low level device access. While this is no problem on Android devices the iPhone is locked down for good..
Main interest is NFC communications because of identification/tracking possibilities.
Apple provides high level access to most functionality and it’s well documented. This is suitable for most applications. It is possible to use NFC for a lot of things without any trouble (use it for several purposes at home and for work). The request of the EU is to gain low level access circumventing Apple’s privacy restrictions.
Other parts of the requests are byproducts. Ever heard of a request to put Volkswagen wheels on a Mercedes ? Or a request to open up full control of their ear phones on iOS? On Android there’s plenty of functionality, on iOS it’s just dumb ear phones. Where’s that request ?
I would like to congratulate Adam for his very balanced reporting on the issue, without any polarization! That is a cherisable good in our modern world!
As Apple user, I have good faith that the company intends to make great products for me. And as EU citizen, I have good faith that the EU Commission guards my and my fellow citizens’ overall digital and democratic well-being. I am confident that when open discussions on these different viewpoints take place, good solutions can be found that bring every party involved forward. Let’s keep faith in respectful discussions!
Mr. Perlman seems to be reacting to some deep internal issue rather than reality. All the things he lists as part of the EU’s “deep trouble”, to the extent that they are present in the US, do not do much to make the US a better place to live than Europe for it’s citizens. That aside the point here is that the EU rules are not all that unreasonable unless you are Apple. Apple has not had anyone looking over it’s shoulder so to speak as it has designed it’s ecosystem. The result has been a very smoothly integrated ecosystem but also one which was not very friendly to outsiders. The EU regulations may indeed make it a bit more difficult for Apple to live the life to which it has become accustomed but they will also open the Apple ecosystem to others on a more equitable basis. Given Apple’s origins ( Think Different ) it is sad to see that their reaction is to whine rather than simply go about recognising what it is that the EU regulations are trying to achieve and making their ecosystem not just conform but excel. None of the stuff the EU is mandating is impossible. Nor is it particularly difficult to implement. Apple’s quiet acquiescence in Russia and China versus it’s moaning in Europe adds hypocrisy to the charge sheet. Time to step up Tim.
PS - While we are thinking about all this, and the digital “quality of life” in particular, isnt it time for some meaningful oversight of things digital in the US?
Funny I see here lots of political responses while all of mine have been deleted by the moderator. There is no way to contribute to a discussion if I have to worry that my response is going to be censored and as a result the discussion is skewed away.
What I’m trying to do here is keep the discussion focused on Apple and this particular situation, without devolving into general opinions about the EU or other EU-related topics that have no end, much less any connection with TidBITS.
That’s why I’m removing your subsequent posts about higher prices in the Netherlands and the Dutch parliament’s opposition to the Danish plan to monitor EU citizen chat messages.