Maybe Apple will never fully walk away from Europe, but the European Commission has just guaranteed that the citizens of its member states will always be the last to get new iPhone features — if they get them at all.
Even before its latest legal requirements, the European Commission (EC) has already put Apple in the position of keeping iPhone mirroring away from Europe, and delaying Apple Intelligence. But it’s only going to get worse — and this is entirely the European Commission’s fault.
Under the banner of protecting consumer and business interests, the EC has made it so that any firm would drop Europe to the bottom of its list of priorities.
But then of course, the new requirements do not apply to just any firm, they solely apply to Apple. They don’t even apply to any other company that ostensibly falls under exactly the same Digital Markets Act (DMA) definition of a gatekeeper firm.
“The DMA regulates the actions of so-called gatekeepers,” says the European Commission in its Q&A addition to the new stipulations. “Gatekeepers are large online platforms that have been designated as such because they provide services — so called core platform services — to many European users.”
“The DMA lays down rules to ensure contestability and fairness for business users and end users,” it continues. “This includes an obligation on gatekeepers of operating systems to provide, free of charge, effective interoperability with the same hardware and software features available to services provided by the gatekeeper itself.”
Fine words, but incredibly they are not actually true words. Despite all the EC says, there are no such obligations on any gatekeeper, except Apple.
It’s not as if Apple is some saintly organization. Look at its record with unions, or look at how it appears to Sherlock developers.
But the EC’s new stipulations have nothing to do with Apple’s actions, and have very little to do with fairness for consumers or businesses. They are about politics and the truly shocking gullibility of people who appear to believe whoever they spoke to last.
“The specified measures are based on extensive technical discussions between the Commission, Apple and numerous interested stakeholders, in particular developers,” says the EC. “The measures take into account feedback received from third parties on the importance of interoperability for certain iOS features and on Apple’s handling of interoperability requests.”
“This constructive dialogue allowed the Commission to identify the measures that developers need to offer innovative products and services,” it continues, “while ensuring that end users maintain their known iPhone user experience and enjoy improved interoperability.”
Except it doesn’t ensure that. It does the opposite of ensuring any of this.
By requiring Apple to provide interoperability on day one of any new feature or technology, it might as well be trying to ensure that there won’t be a day one for users in Europe.
Apple will surely block more new features in the EU
Instead, as it has done before, Apple will roll out new features everywhere else in the world. And then, maybe turn to doing all of the extra work that the EC mandates.
Even if Apple delays features for the EU, its rivals operating within Europe could just wait until they can legally take what they want and apply it worldwide.
iPhone Mirroring in use in the US, but not in the EU
Apple has complained that there are already companies that solely copy Apple’s technology. But now the EC is requiring Apple to give it to them, and do so for free.
By demanding that rivals get the same features at the same time as Apple, the EC is also forcing the company to delay introducing its own features to its own products.
The only way Apple can avoid having its intellectual property taken by anyone who wants it, is to not deploy that IP within the EU.
What the EC does and what it says it does
Both Apple and the EC say that they have worked together, but perhaps no one involved the Commission’s communications department. There is a total disconnect between what the EC says it is doing, and what it is actually achieving.
For instance, the EC announcement quite grandly states that the obligations also encourage “the gatekeepers to innovate its [sic] platform and its own products and services.” Note the singular “its” about Apple after the pretense of referring to gatekeeper firms, plural.
Plus, you can say it all you like, but what the EC has done must mean that Apple will at least slow down developing its offerings within the EU.
There is also an argument that the very same stipulations will curtail innovation from Apple’s rivals. If all you have to do is ask Apple for a freebie, there’s no incentive to invest money and time figuring out anything yourself.
So without question, EU users will become second-rate citizens as far as Apple devices and apps are concerned. Without much doubt, rival firms will cut back on their own research and development expecting government-mandated handouts from Apple, making the situation worse.
Making privacy and security impossible
But at least EU citizens will be protected — except, they won’t. Rivals are now allowed to ask for access to pretty much anything they like on the iPhone, and presumably Apple has to have very good reason to refuse it.
Whereas it appears that rivals do not have to offer any reason at all for why they want certain access. As Apple points out, Meta has already requested access to more than a dozen privacy-sensitive technologies to do with CarPlay, iPhone mirroring, or devices connected via Bluetooth.
The EU must know this, but it doesn’t appear to have asked Meta why, for one single example, it wants access to an iPhone user’s Wi-Fi network details. There is no benefit at all to a Facebook user of surrendering this information.
Whereas there potentially is a lot of profit for Meta in being able to determine where a user is now, where they go to work, and where they shop.
You’d have thought that if the EC cared about consumers, it would care about their privacy. You would have thought that if the EC institutes legal requirements against gatekeeper companies, that it would apply these stipulations to all of them.
It’s not like there are all that many. Currently there are six — and Facebook/Meta is one of them. The others are:
- Alphabet/Google
- Amazon
- Microsoft
- ByteDance
There’s a perhaps surprising, perhaps not, lack of European companies on this list. Spotify should be on it, for instance.
What happens next
The European Union could be admired for how it has implemented regulations controlling Big Tech where practically the rest of the world is just talking about it a lot. But what the EC has now demonstrated is that this is not about controlling Big Tech for the benefit of its citizens.
As Tim Cook once, and quite uncharacteristically, said of the EU and Ireland’s tax dispute, this is all “total political crap.”
The thing with politics is that it comes with righteous and grandiose claims, usually accompanied with politicians wrapping themselves in the appropriately-colored flag, but then a collapse under pressure. And of those six gatekeeper firms, five of them are American, so it’s not likely that laws letting rivals walk away with technology is going to go uncontested by these companies with armies of lawyers, and funding in equal measure.
It may even become contested within the EU itself. For in mid-2026, Ireland takes over the presidency of the Union, and Tim Cook has already said that will be “a significant milestone.”
So, we’ll see in time how this develops. In the short-term, though, the law appears to be a clumsy effort at attacking US big tech, with no gain for anybody but politicians and losses for everybody else.
