EUs

It’ll likely take years before the U.S. government’s massive antitrust lawsuit against Apple is resolved—but the iPhone maker’s troubles with European regulators offer a glimpse of what changes American customers may see down the line.The U.S. lawsuit seeks to stop Apple from undermining technologies that compete with its own apps in areas such as streaming, messaging, and digital payments. The Department of Justice also wants to prevent the tech giant from building language into its contracts with developers, accessory…

Apple recently released a swathe of massive changes to the way it distributes apps on iPhone in the EU. As part of its plan to comply with the new Digital Markets Act, Apple has introduced new ways to distribute and download apps on iPhone through alternative app marketplaces. To discuss the new changes, how Apple is handling them, and what they might mean to developers, I recently sat down with MacPaw, the development team behind the popular macOS subscription service Setapp, which lets users subscribe to a library of…

EU industry chief Thierry Breton on Thursday warned large online platforms against threatening developers, saying he would look into Apple's move to prevent Fortnite video-game maker Epic Games from launching its own online marketplace on iPhones and iPads in Europe as a matter of priority.The iPhone maker on Wednesday terminated a new developer account created by Epic in Sweden in an attempt to put Fortnite and other games back on iPhones in Europe by running its own game store on Apple's devices. It cited Epic's past…

The compliance deadline for the six tech giants regulated under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) expired yesterday. Which means Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance/TikTok, Meta and Microsoft are now under active assessment by EU enforcers. The bloc will monitor whether they’re abiding by DMA requirements to deal fairly with business users of their regulated core platform services and meeting other legal requirements in areas like data portability, platform interoperability and user choice. Failure…

As the world's biggest tech companies revamp their core online services to comply with the European Union's landmark Digital Markets Act, the changes could give some smaller rivals and even peers a competitive edge.The DMA is Europe's attempt to rein in Alphabet's Google, Amazon, Apple, TikTok owner ByteDance, Meta Platforms and Microsoft and create a level playing field for smaller rivals and ultimately more competition for Europeans.Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill CoursesOffering…

It happened, after years of chin-wagging and back-and-forth and bad blood, it finally happened: the compliance date for the Digital Markets Act arrived on March 7th. From here on out, big tech needs to follow the regulations laid out by the EU — and this has the potential to usher in a sea change for the sector. While the rules laid down by the governing body are complex and multifaceted, the overall aim is pretty clear: to increase competition and break the monopoly of tech’s “gatekeepers.”…

Apple is opening small cracks in the iPhone’s digital fortress as part of a regulatory clampdown in Europe that is striving to give consumers more choices—at the risk of creating new avenues for hackers to steal personal and financial information stored on the devices.The overhaul rolling out Thursday only in the European Union represents the biggest changes to the iPhone’s App Store since Apple introduced the concept in 2008. Among other things, people in Europe can download iPhone apps from stores that aren’t operated…

The EU’s strictest-ever crackdown on big tech has only just begun, but critics fear it’s already missing the targets. Called the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the landmark law aims to curb the power of tech giants. Under the rules, the EU can designate companies that dominate a marketplace as “gatekeepers.” This forces them to make their services open to competitors.  Whatsapp, for instance, has to become interoperable with third-party messaging services. Mobile operating systems, meanwhile, must…

Apple, no friend of the European Commission at the best of times, has released a strongly-worded press release in which it explains why it isn't happy about a $2 billion fine levied by the EC. The fine comes after the Commission found that Apple's "abusive App Store rules" unfairly affected music streaming apps like Spotify and others, preventing them from pointing users toward cheaper prices outside of the App Store. It also impacted users by making them pay more, too, the EC suggests. And Apple really isn't happy about…

Two years ago, Yuri Burda and Harri Edwards, researchers at OpenAI, were trying to find out what it would take to get a large language model to do basic arithmetic. At first, things didn’t go too well. The models memorized the sums they saw but failed to solve new ones.  By accident, Burda and Edwards left some of their experiments running for days rather than hours. The models were shown the example sums over and over again, and eventually they learned to add two numbers—it had just taken a lot more time than anybody…