It has been 138 days — a new record — since I last wrote about the European Union’s Digital Markets Act. Unfortunately, I’m now breaking the streak. From the Apple Newsroom, a post titled “The Digital Markets Act’s Impact on E.U. Users”:

The DMA requires Apple to make certain features work on non-Apple products and apps before we can share them with our users. Unfortunately, that requires a lot of engineering work, and it’s caused us to delay some new features in the EU:

Apple proceeds to list off four features it can’t bring to European devices due to the regulation: Live Translation, “to make sure” translations “won’t be exposed to other countries or developers either”; iPhone Mirroring, because Apple hasn’t “found a secure way to bring this feature to non-Apple devices”; and Visited Places and Preferred Routes because Apple couldn’t “share these capabilities with other developers without exposing our users’ locations.” These are all honorable reasons to prevent these features from coming to European users, and it’s truly baffling how this law hasn’t been amended to let “gatekeepers” make innovative features. The whole point of the DMA is to inspire competition, right? How does preventing a private company from making a feature that seamlessly works with that company’s products inspire competition?

We want our users in Europe to enjoy the same innovations at the same time as everyone else, and we’re fighting to make that possible — even when the DMA slows us down. But the DMA means the list of delayed features in the EU will probably get longer. And our EU users’ experience on Apple products will fall further behind.

This is the most scathing language I’ve heard in an Apple press release in a very long time — probably more so than the one bashing Spotify from last March. And for good reason, too: European regulators have shown no good faith in crafting or applying this law, and they seem to have no care for their constituents, whom the law directly affects. The revenue lost out on not having Live Translation or iPhone Mirroring in the E.U. is extremely minute for Apple, but the innovation E.U. consumers will no longer enjoy is devastating. This press release is a direct plea to Europeans to protest their government.

As an American, I imagine the responses to this piece will be highly negative given my own government’s tyrannical, nonsensical positions on almost anything, from Tylenol to late-night comedy. Apple could never bash the Trump administration in a press release like this, even if it instituted the exact same rules in the United States. When the administration imposed crippling tariffs on goods from China and India, Apple bribed President Trump instead of fighting back. The only reason Apple is able to publish a press release like this one is because in Europe, companies and people have freedom of speech, and no E.U. country — with the notable exception of Hungary — runs on bribery.

For the first time, pornography apps are available on iPhone from other marketplaces — apps we’ve never allowed on the App Store because of the risks they create, especially for children. That includes Hot Tub, a pornography app that was announced by AltStore earlier this year. The DMA has also brought gambling apps to iPhone in regions where they are prohibited by law.

Congratulations to Riley Testut, the developer of AltStore, for making his first appearance on the Apple Newsroom. (This is perhaps the only part where I diverge significantly from Apple’s position.)

So far, companies have submitted requests for some of the most sensitive data on a user’s iPhone. The most concerning include:

  • The complete content of a user’s notifications: This data includes the content of a user’s messages, emails, medical alerts, and any other notifications a user receives. And it would reveal data to other companies that currently, even Apple can’t access.

  • The full history of Wi-Fi networks a user has joined: Wi-Fi history can reveal sensitive information about a user’s location and activities. For instance, companies can use it to track whether you’ve visited a certain hospital, hotel, fertility clinic, or courthouse.

I’m willing to believe this, and also probably ascribe these ridiculous requests to Meta. I shouldn’t need to explain why these interoperability requests should be denied, and the fact that Apple finds a need to mention them publicly is telling. But again, the true language of these comments strikes me as something increasingly impossible for a company like Apple with spineless leadership to use in the United States. It’s defending fertility clinics presumably because a vast majority of Europeans support freedom, but I’m not sure the same argument would work in the United States. This is very clearly propaganda for Europeans to complain to their government. This statement is also believable: “And it would reveal data to other companies that currently, even Apple can’t access.” This has been the DMA’s motto since its writing — nobody in Brussels understands how computers work.

Large companies continue to submit new requests to collect even more data — putting our EU users at much higher risk of surveillance and tracking. Our teams have explained these risks to the European Commission, but so far, they haven’t accepted privacy and security concerns as valid reasons to turn a request down.

Point proven. I don’t think the E.U. doesn’t care about privacy, but its regulators are tech-illiterate. While the “haven’t accepted” framing is intentional propaganda, I do believe regulators at the European Commission, the executive body of the E.U., believe “interoperability” is more important than user privacy. Apple products are renowned for their privacy and security — it’s a selling point. And even if it weren’t, I’d argue any corporate goal should be deprioritized over privacy. The DMA is a capitalist law because the E.U. is capitalist — it just argues that capitalism should be spearheaded by European companies like Spotify instead of U.S. companies like Apple or Google. As such, it takes the capitalist route and forgoes any care toward actual people. The DMA doesn’t have Europeans’ interests at heart. It’s written for Spotify.

Unfair competition: The DMA’s rules only apply to Apple, even though Samsung is the smartphone market leader in Europe, and Chinese companies are growing fast. Apple has led the way in building a unique, innovative ecosystem that others have copied — to the benefit of users everywhere. But instead of rewarding that innovation, the DMA singles Apple out while leaving our competitors free to continue as they always have.

It doesn’t just single Apple out, but I get the thesis, and there’s no doubt the DMA was heavily inspired by Apple. Some lines even sound like legislators wrote them just to spite Cupertino. But the broader idea of the DMA is rooted in saltiness that the United States builds supercomputers while Europe’s greatest inventions of the last decade include a cap that’s attached to the bottle (a genuinely good idea!) and incessant cookie prompts on every website. So, the DMA was carefully crafted not just to benefit European companies but to punish American companies for their success. Meta must provide its services for free, Apple must let anyone do business on iOS, and Google can’t improve Google Search with its own tools. This is nothing short of lawfare.

I think regulation is good, and the fact that the United States has never passed meaningful “Big Tech” regulation is the reason this country has been put out to pasture in nine months. Social media has radicalized both sides of the political spectrum due to poor content moderation. Children are committing suicide due to ChatGPT’s instructions. Newly graduated computer scientists can’t get jobs because generative artificial intelligence occupies entry-level positions. Mega-corporations like Meta get away scot-free with selling user data to the highest bidder and tracking users everywhere on the internet and in real life. Spotify lowballs artists and pays its chief executive hundreds of millions of dollars a year. I’m not saying these issues don’t exist in Europe too, but they’re the fault of American corporations that have run unregulated for decades.

So, the concept of the DMA is sound, but that doesn’t mean it’s well-meaning, and it certainly doesn’t mean the execution went well.