Apple's policies banning developers from referring customers to alternative payments has been widely ruled illegal around the world, first and foremost in the USA where they were even referred for criminal investigation for continuing to do it after being court ordered to stop.
Google has been twice convicted of antitrust monopoly abuse in the last year in the USA, and found to have exploited user privacy settings several times.
Meta's harmful practices have been continuously revealed in court: allowing sex trafficking and prostitution to help train their AI, allowing scam ads because they're profitable, deliberately exploiting children spending in games because it's profitable, and illegally tracked users.
Amazon's antitrust for exploiting vendor data is ongoing, so I guess you can have a point there.
The DMA and DSA already allow fines up to 10 - 20% of global turnover (effectively 30 - 40% of annual profit) and breaking up noncompliant companies.
The issue is nobody wants to pull the trigger because the companies that would get fined or broken up have curried favour with Trump to circumvent these consequences.
That's a similar scale as GDPR violations. And EU companies I worked with were always very serious about GDPR regulations, even if their internal training confirms fines were always really small compared to maximums.
US doesn't care about warnings and small fines, though. If penalties are not enforced, it's like they don't exist.
> Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly voiced his dissatisfaction and sought support from Trump, while Apple’s Tim Cook reportedly asked the White House to directly intervene against EU fines imposed on his company.
Apple even went so far as to demand the EU repeal these laws, and is likely still non-compliant in several ways; for which they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
> they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities wasn’t such a great idea. Other incentives may have been better suited to getting the populace what they want in the long term.
>Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities
right, the tradition is that fines be cartoonishly small so that breaking the law can be factored into the cost of doing business, who the hell does the EU think they are to go against tradition!!?
I don't think there is an incentive lawmakers could offer that is worth more to Apple than monopolizing fees and subverting competition, there is practically no limits they will go to to preserve that status quo around the world.
The only time they have eagerly complied with anything relating to this is when Judge YGR gave them this ultimatum, they approved Fortnite a full day early once someone had to be personally responsible for defying her order a second time:
That seems like a better model than stupefying fines against the corporate entity then. Forget about billion dollar fines, just give them a slap on the wrist while telling them explicitly what they have to stop doing, but then if they keep doing it the executives are personally held in contempt.
It also solves the perverse incentive of "fine the foreign companies as a revenue generation method" because the result is getting them to comply instead of either repeatedly fining them for not doing it or trying to extract a fine so large it becomes an international political issue.
Nope. All that does is create a rash of execs/decisionmakers who become sacrificial fixtures who absolutely do not travel to the jurisdiction in question, thusly handily sidestepping the accountability. It has to be fines. At the end of the day, it's going to become a political sticking point one way or another if we're going to share and coexist on the same planet.
The "Digital Services Act" effectively takes the divisive dark money out of advertising and requires more than minimum-effort moderation, affecting Meta and X:
- bans targeted advertising based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and puts restrictions on targeting ads to children
- requires transparency on content algorithms and advertising
- requires online platforms prevent and remove posts containing illegal goods, services, or content in a timely fashion
The "Digital Markets Act" requires interoperability and competition:
- requires Apple to allow competing app stores, very contentious for Apple who invented a stack of fees for this
- requires Apple and Google to allow apps to freely use 3rd party payments, this is very contentious for Apple and they still charge for doing so
- allow 3rd parties interoperability, eg headphones and smartwatches for Apple and messaging clients for Meta, this is starting to improve
- allow removal of preinstalled apps, settings of new defaults, this is largely done although malicious compliance has kept rival browsers at bay on iPhone
> The discovery landscape is changing. AI-assisted research is expanding vulnerability discovery across the ecosystem, increasing both coverage and speed. The balance between findings and remediation capacity in open source has substantively shifted. We have a responsibility to the community to ensure this program effectively accomplishes its ambitious dual purpose: discovery and remediation. Accordingly, we are pausing submissions while we consider the structure and incentives needed to further these goals.
Very cool, I think one of the biggest opportunities Playwright has is making it a more general purpose tool for non-developers, writing the tests and getting them to a state where they reliably pass has always been so much more finicky than it should be.
I really like this space. I prototyped a concept last year for product/qa teams to write the tests, I was able to run Playwright in a docker container and stream the session to the browser using VNC and web sockets to extract the test recorder and relay commands, allowing the user to run Playwright and record tests without needing anything installed.
It was a lot of fun, but what turned me off it was the likelihood anyone not already using Playwright would have to update their frontend and keep streamlining that before they really got any value out of it.
Yeah my big thing was this needed to be local, because I want to test against localhost, so rather than a web app, a desktop app made sense. I'd like to build in some sort of team features to it, so that you can collaborate with other people.
This was only my second desktop app ever, my first being a DVD burning app for the Mac, so you can guess how long ago that was!
In my experience the code will, but by year 5 nobody is left who worked on it from inception, and by year 10 nobody knows anybody who did, and during that time it reaches a stage where nobody will ever feel any sense of ownership or care about the code in its entirety again.
I come into work and work on a 20 year old codebase every day, working on slowly modernizing it while preserving the good parts. In my experience, and I've been experimenting with both a lot, LLM-based tools are far worse at this than they are at starting new greenfield projects.
When it comes to professional development, I've almost never worked on a codebase less than 10 years old, and it was always [either silently or overtly] understood that the software we are writing is a project that's going to effectively live forever. Or at least until the company is no longer recognizable from what it is today. It just seems wild and unbelievable to me, to go to work at a company and know that your code is going to be compiled, sent off to customers, and then nobody is ever going to touch it again. Where the product is so throwaway that you're going to work on it for about a year and then start another greenfield codebase. Yet there are companies that operate that way!
reply