&gt; Fines imposed on undertakings found in breach of EU antitrust rules are paid into the general EU budget. This money is not earmarked for particular expenses, but Member States&#x27; contributions to the EU budget for the following year are reduced accordingly. The fines therefore help to finance the EU and reduce the burden for taxpayers.This quote is re: anti-trust, but likely generalizes.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;competition-policy.ec.europa.eu&#x2F;index&#x2F;fines_en#:~:text=Fines%20imposed%20on%20undertakings%20found,following%20year%20are%20reduced%20accordingly." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;competition-policy.ec.europa.eu&#x2F;index&#x2F;fines_en#:~:te...</a>

It&#x27;s not the ads you are consenting to, its the personal data collection and targeting.You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.

No. They just made it illegal for Meta specifically to do it, and they’re reserving judgment for anyone else on their hit list covered by the DMA. The DMA is not neutral laws on neutral principles despite the PR and the extra layers of indirection, it targets American and Chinese companies specifically because that’s what it was designed to do.

No, the EU has made it illegal to extort payment before allowing people to opt-out of data collection or profiling.

Under the GDPR, it’s illegal to treat PII like currency. You can’t gate a service behind PII consent.

&gt; &quot;pay or consent&quot; advertising model,Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?

Not necessarily Meta, but it&#x27;s very much possible that a large company is the recipient of both EU subsidies and EU fines :)

&gt; somehow deducted from subsidiesDo you think the EU subsidizes Meta&#x2F;Apple.

&gt; Apple faces a €500 million fine for breaching the regulation’s rules for app stores, while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its &quot;pay or consent&quot; advertising model,&gt; The procedural fines fall short of the two giant penalties issued by the EU executive under its antitrust laws last year: €1.8 billion to Apple for abusing its dominant position while distributing music streaming apps, and €797 million to Meta for pushing its classified ads service on social media users.Really honest questions: are those fines actually paid, in practice ? Is there a way for a citizen to know ? (As in, do they appear in the public budget of the UE ?) Or are they somehow deducted from subsidies, added to taxes, etc... ?I know who collects taxes in France (&quot;Le Tresor Public&quot;). I don&#x27;t know of a EU version of a treasury. Is it collected by one of the member states (Ireland, I would guess ?)

You’re missing a third option there, which makes it not extortion.

You must be either broke and&#x2F;or paranoid. If it matters to you, pay up. If it doesn&#x27;t, you get to use a service for free.

Pay or have your information harvested and sold. Its extortion.

YouTube allows you to disable personalized ads.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;intl&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;howyoutubeworks&#x2F;user-settings&#x2F;ad-settings&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;intl&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;howyoutubeworks&#x2F;user-sett...</a>

Thanks for clarifying, it was confusing to figure that out from the article

It’s not about being shown ads, it’s about collecting (and sharing to third parties) private information that goes beyond the technically required amount to use the service. GDPR says companies need to get my consent in order to do that, that I am free to not give this consent and that a service can’t not be provided to me just because I don’t give this consent.
Facebook and a bunch of other companies said “aha! We’ll just create a paid alternative!” but this doesn’t comply with the law. It just took a while to take this through the courts but if you read the law it’s clear they just stalled for time on this one.

&gt; You have to buy youtube premium to avoid adsOr you can block the ads in the browser for free. In this case, you have to consent being tracked (or pay) or otherwise the page will not display.

&gt; while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its &quot;pay or consent&quot; advertising model, which requires that European Union users pay to access ad-free versions of Facebook and InstagramWait, isn&#x27;t pretty much all web content is like this nowadays? You have to buy youtube premium to avoid ads, how is it different?

Isn&#x27;t it just in the name of competition, i.e. alternative app stores? Or is sideloading an explicit goal of the EU&#x27;s efforts?

&gt; They are adept at malicious compliance.They just got fined 500 millions for failure to comply so I&#x27;m not sure adept is the adjective I would use.

The EU should instead set targets.Ie. &quot;More than half of users have installed at least one app from a non-apple affiliated store by Jan 2026 or you shall pay a fine of $10 per month per iPhone in use in the EU&quot;.

I would not hold my breath. They are adept at malicious compliance. Cook will do a cost&#x2F;benefit assessment and will come up with another workaround.

You are of the opinion that it is reasonable for a company to expect you to read, understand and fully agree with a contract that consists of countless pages of opaque legalese and that you have no say in whatsoever, just in order to use a service that&#x27;s arguably a necessity to participate in public life?The EU does not seem to share that opinion, and puts some restrictions on these types of &#x27;contracts&#x27;. Are you really concerned that this is somehow unfair towards these companies? Companies that retain whole teams of lawyers to create a contract that hardly any of its billion counter parties (individual consumers) can fully comprehend, let alone push back on?

Parts of the contract can be illegal, this is completely within the power of the EU to enforce a crackdown on illegal contracts.

I&#x27;m not sure what society you are referring to but contracts have to adhere to laws in the EU.This is also about software that is being updated. So the transaction is not completed yet. Apple could probably go the route of not providing the update to phones that were sold before the law was voted on&#x2F;in place. I would guess that would lead to other legal battles.

There&#x27;s a range of anti-competitive behavior which can subvert that ideal, and as such there&#x27;s regulation aimed to prevent it. Apple used to forbid apps from telling users about Apple&#x27;s 30% cut or cheaper places to buy the app, for instance, hindering users from making an informed choice.Many of the policies in question are intentionally not publicized to end-users, often requiring first paying to be part of the developer program before you can even see what you need to agree to to publish an app.

Generally, as a society, we hold that a contract cannot be modified without both parties’ agreement. When you bought that phone, it was with the completely clear, overt, and in no way uncertain understanding that it does specifically X Y Z, and does not do A B C. Now, without additional payment to the counterparty, you’re demanding your phone do A B C. What am I missing? According to accepted understandings of contracts, how are you possibly in the right? How are you possibly in a position to demand government use force to modify a contract you accepted before to somehow benefit you more at a cost to your counterparty?

I hope this will make Apple finally comply with EU law and allow app side loading on iOS. Real side loading, not the joke they implemented since iOS 17.

At least they seem to have their own system in place for displaying those share buttons, as there are no requests to 3rd party domains on page load, everything loads from *europa.eu. Could have been worse :)

Which shows that they&#x27;re not discriminating. TikTok is missing, though.

EU comission has been fined for breaching GDPR they designed themselves<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;europe&#x2F;first-eu-court-fines-eu-breaching-own-data-protection-law-2025-01-08&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;europe&#x2F;first-eu-court-fines-eu...</a>

It shouldn&#x27;t be funny, social media isn&#x27;t doing the world any favor, they gotta behave

It’s funny to see a “share this page on Facebook” option at the bottom of the press release.

The EU Comission press release: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;commission&#x2F;presscorner&#x2F;detail&#x2F;en&#x2F;ip_25_1085" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;commission&#x2F;presscorner&#x2F;detail&#x2F;en&#x2F;ip_25_...</a>

Duplicate: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43770337">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43770337</a>

They will appeal to Court so that they win another 2 years.

Is this a fine the companies can appeal, or is this a final decision?

These fines make sense. The EU is driving a pro-competition capitalist model. American companies will have to compete, and not just entrap users.

You can buy an android or huawei phone. Just because the ecosystem you like to use doesn&#x27;t have certain features doesn&#x27;t make it a monopoly.

Because the fine is exactly about giving people a more fair chance to vote with their wallets.This is from the Yahoo article:&quot;The EU competition watchdog said Apple must remove technical and commercial restrictions that prevent app developers from steering users to cheaper deals outside the App Store.&quot;

The first beneficiary is likely to be Epic, since this is basically what they were asking for in the Fortnite lawsuit.

The irony is that smaller American companies stand the most to benefit from EU DMA, including startups. Stripe could offer deeper payment integration without the Apple cut. You could start an indie game store. And Garmin can make better sport watches with better integration.

Except the smartphone market isn&#x27;t a monopoly.20 years ago Europe had a thriving phone industry. Now it&#x27;s just gone, and they want to blame everyone else for this, and fail to reflect on why it happened.

Because in a case of monopoly, the people can not vote with their wallet.

If Apple don’t like the EU regulations, they’re free to vote with their wallets and stop selling their products there.

The problem is if you go for a free market &quot;vote with their wallets&quot; approach, you end up with a problem like the US did with Microsoft having too high of a market share and control on browsers, media players and operating systems.Customers can only really vote with their wallets when there is choice and no de facto standard. On top of that, many consumers don&#x27;t really understand that things like their privacy and and choice has been taken away from them.I do not agree with all parts of the DMA and I think it&#x27;s overbearing in some areas but also lacklustre in others but I do think it&#x27;s important that we don&#x27;t let monopolies control our lives.

&gt; if Europe actually produced a company with the innovation and scale of Apple.Except a functional society does not need companies &quot;the scale of Apple&quot; to work.In fact it&#x27;s probably the opposite : nobody can beat Apple or Google because they already have too much power worldwide.Even in the US, where is the free market ? Nobody can create a company that will compete with Apple or Google. Sure, there was an open window for new competitors in the capitalism game in the 90-2010 era with the rise of the home computing but now everything is locked up again.A functionnal society doesn&#x27;t need huge actors, it only needs an environment where companies that win the capitalism game don&#x27;t become trusts and where small companies can shine.I don&#x27;t want an european alternative to Apple, I want an ecosystem of companies that specializes in what they are good at and that are forced to work together to be interoperable.

It&#x27;s hard to make informed choices and vote with your wallet when you&#x27;re unaware of alternatives. Apple&#x27;s ban on even mentioning competing options tries to preserve this information gap to the detriment of its customers.

Well.. ish. But really it started with iPhone. I&#x27;ve used those Nokia &quot;smartphones&quot;. They were less the start of the smartphone revolution than PalmPilot or the IBM PC.

Do you realize that the smartphone revolution started here with Nokia?

EU fines Apple €500M and Meta €200M