Cory Doctorow:
Apple isn’t going to exit a market with half a billion affluent consumers. If it does, expect its shareholders to wreak swift and terrible vengeance on the company. You know how people are always complaining that investors are only interested in short-term returns? It’s true and here’s a place where that cuts in our favor: shareholders aren’t going to accept a half-billion-person market exit tomorrow in anticipation of forcing the EU to capitulate next year and thereafter safeguard Apple’s continental scale rent-extraction racket. They want returns to their capital tomorrow, not in some hypothetical future in which Tim Cook tears out Henna Virkkunen’s still-beating heart with his bare hands and parades it through Strasbourg, brandishing it at legions of trembling, vanquished eurocrats.
But let’s say Apple does exit the EU.
Good.
The EU needs to get the hell off US tech infrastructure.
Oof, that feels like a punch in the throat, but I get it. I wish I could say that the Apple that’s doing this isn’t the same Apple that makes stuff that I (still) enjoy using—I mean, it is and it isn’t, just like twenty years ago the Sony that made cool recording devices was and wasn’t the same Sony that enforced excruciating DRM on the same products. And this is not a Tim Cook vs Steve Jobs situation—the logic of gross capitalism was the same fifteen years ago.
Anyway, I’m just going to leave this here, because I get it, and I’ll live with my contradictions. I want a world where Apple doesn’t suck at these things, where shareholders’ interest isn’t the only thing that matters—but that world is probably a world where Apple ceased to exist in the 1990s, if it ever existed at all.
But the point of the piece is this:
The EU doesn’t need to be a technology-taker – it can be a technology maker. The Apple/Google duopoly may have sewn up the mobile market with illegal monopoly tactics, but that doesn’t mean that the EU will never spawn another Nokia or Ericsson. The shortest, most efficient, most reliable path to reestablishing technological sovereignty for the EU’s half-billion residents and 27 member-states is to allow domestic firms to take over the relationship between the […] American tech giants and the Europeans who rely on their technology.
(Unpleasant word redacted.) But yeah, Nokia and Ericsson—notorious champions of good UX design. Maybe Ikea can step in 😂