Digital Markets Act aims to allow more competition and let consumers delete preloaded phone apps
Haven't seen any posts about this and it's a pretty big thing. From DMA website:
Examples of the “do’s”: gatekeepers will for example have to:
allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations;
provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper;
allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform.
Example of the “don'ts”: gatekeepers will for example no longer:
treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform;
prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so;
track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted.
We'll see how this plays out but this is first move in a very long time that could open up platform like WhatsApp to 3rd party clients and force Google and Apple to open their mobile OSes to other apps. Maybe we'll see stock Android without play services? One can dream...
Individual countries do care. Germany has pretty comprehensive privacy laws already. And it is not only about privacy, it is also about power and regulation.
Dashcams are illegal in Germany (no idea how Teslas are allowed, though), and so is Google Street View! Don't fuck with the German government when it comes to privacy.
Because all those Tech Giants are American or Chinese. EU is lagging behind US on innovation so now they want to make Tech Giants jobs more difficult in hopes that this will create some openings for EU tech firms. They don't really care about you're privacy that much, they just want it make more difficult for Google and Facebook to siphon money out of EU. It's still great for us, don't get me wrong.