I concur. We need to establish a "secondary markets act", which would allow individuals to transact accounts and digital items worth under a certain amount (let's say $10k, as a non-waivable right, so it wouldn't apply to larger B2B contracts). Essentially, these things should be viewed as property of the consumer and be freely sold. Without the freedom to transact, there can't be a free market.

If I have full ownership of a digital good, then I have the ability to copy it.

Any limitation of my ability to copy requiring removing some control from the owner and escrowing it with another party (e.g. DRM).

As much as I hate to say it, allowing digital good resale is a good use for a blockchain: uniquely identifying an instance and then keeping a decentralized ledger of who owns it at any time.

However, there would still need to be a carrot to make this system attractive.

If there isn't, then why wouldn't people just create infinite copies off-ledger and ignore it?

And without any viable digital goods ownership system, who wouldn't companies default to the current model of only offering licenses / subscriptions?

I assume plenty of people are willing to pay for things they appreciate. Maybe the carrot can be some kind of recognition: you get to make a digital signature from that token that you can display as a part of your digital identity. There could be discussion forums that require you to have such a token to participate in.

resaleable digital licenses. that's why Steam banned them, not because Valve is noble but because if your video game license was an NFT you could resell it outside of their marketplace and they like their little monopoly

This is of course also a factor in the move to subscriptions since you'd no longer own a persistent license or product and as such there's nothing to sell. Ironically this should also mean the 'product' (subscription) has far less value than the actual product, even if it's technically the same system/software. Yet subscriptions are more costly than a one-off you repeat every couple of years. Sigh.

There is a very easy way to get around such a requirement from legislation: Just call it licensing instead of a purchase.

The need for such a legislation is corporations reckless use of the words "purchase" and "buy" for goods that have been licensed.

Licensing should come with enhanced consumer rights e.g. an explicit license duration and allow the consumer to return the license for pro-rata refund within that duration. The license should be for the IP and honoured for all formats and platforms that meet some regularity threshold. The absurdity of having to rebuy things you "own" because you switch device or format has to end.

Along similar lines, hardware should be called "hire" not "sell" when the manufacturer maintains control over the device e.g. locked bootloaders, encryption keys, online service dependencies, forced updates with no downgrade, remote-access privileges, telemetry, not meeting "right-to-repair", hardware locking preventing component replacement or choice of consumable (e.g. ink) etc.

Similar return rights should apply if hardware is leased. Seller would need to be insured/escrow to meet consumer refunds if they break their side of the lease (e.g. going bust and shutting down required online services).

The law should formalize the concepts of rentals (licenses) and purchases. Purchases create non-waivable rights of transferability and allows the owner to demand compensation when a service closes: for example if I shut down my movie platform, you should get to download a copy of everything you own.

Licenses on the other hand do not confer such rights, but should still be transferable under a certain value and have a set period during which its terms must be fulfilled, otherwise the licensee needs to be compensated. No "we change the terms at our sole discretion at any moment" nonsense.

Vendors can give you extra rights (like prorated returns or exchanges), but they can't take any of the codified rights away. I assume there needs to be some details about companies just setting a license of one day but never revokes access to avoid the regulation, but someone smarter than me can probably figure that out.

For larger licenses I think the customer (usually customers) has a greater negotiating leverage, so it isn't as necessary to codify these terms, but of course this is contingent on there not existing trillion-dollar corporations, which is not the world we live in.

If you buy a physical book or DVD, you basically have a perpetual right to read, watch, listen to that copyrighted material. But you can sell that physical item to anyone and with that the right to consume that material.

This is not (or at least should not be) different even if there is no physical item or even if the copyrighted material is software and not audiovisual media.

Buying may have been a misnomer but it had some useful baggage that is shed with the terminology shift.

I didn't realize there were many people defending credit scores. I mean yeah, I would just assume they should be illegal. At least in their current opaque form where it's impossible to contest or even get someone to explain your score to you.

Credit scoring significantly outperforms any other methodology for assessing default risk, including credit matricies and especially human assessments (humans are shockingly bad at assessing default risk, rarely much better than a biased coin flip).

It's all well and good to say we should get rid of credit scores, but because they are so much more effective at assessing default risk than other methods, the consequence will be significantly higher rates of default, which means more people in financial hardship, and higher interest rates generally (though especially to low risk borrowers who will now be assessed as having closer-to-average default risk)

It's also not often appreciated, but credit scoring is also the single best technique we have to stop people borrowing beyond their means and entering into financial hardship and debt spirals. There are other techniques that exist to identify at-risk borrowers but these alone aren't as good as an approach which also incorporates credit scores.

As for explainability, unfortunately the best credit models are trained using AI techniques, which results in low explainability (since the risk signals are complex and multivariate). Older GLM approaches can be used, but aren't as good, so if we want high explainability, the trade off is worse performing credit models, and thus higher borrowing costs.

I think it's reasonable for people to want a society where past financial difficulties (self-induced or otherwise) do not make it difficult for a person to get a job or rent an apartment. That's probably a reasonable preference to impose through legislation even if a credit score has predictive value for the legitimate interests of employers or landlords.

A credit bureau's real product is the credit file, which contains your history of inquiries, defaults, collections, court judgements etc. In some countries it also includes granular payment history information.

From this file, many lenders compute their own internal credit scores. They do this because the credit scores published by the bureaus are the likelihood to default on any loan, however in practice consumers are often more likely to default on certain types of debt than others. Also, many lenders have additional data points that can be considered which the bureau's don't capture, such as the structure of the loan.

If there's anything questionable going on (e.g. using variables which act as proxies for factors prohibited by ECOA or FHA) it will be occuring in these proprietary lender-specific models, however the parameters used in these models also embed commercial sensitive information about the behaviour of their customer base, so I doubt many lenders will be keen to release them.

They significantly improve the ability of a lender to model the default risk associated with a borrower, which results in lower borrowing costs for higher quality customers, as well as stopping debt spirals for people struggling.

In the absence of credit scores, higher quality borrowers will be charged higher interest rates or require higher collateral, since they are less differentiated from average quality borrowers, and/or access to credit will be restricted to a narrower proportion of the population.

Shouldn’t those costs be higher because of the increased risks they represent? If someone has a habit of not paying their debts, why would a lender take on the higher risk without getting paid more? They wouldn’t, so they simply won’t loan the money.

However on the other side of this, nobody has to borrow money. If you don’t borrow, credit scores are irrelevant.

Except if they want their own place to live.

And for the period of about a decade or two, if they want to buy anything over the Internet. For some reason, e-commerce in its early years would only accept credit cards. Took quite a while before debit cards started working for on-line shopping, and by that time, the damage was already done - credit cards got a boost in popularity both in the US and worldwide.

I am used to the word "bias" meaning a specific kind of inaccuracy.

Given we're talking about alternatives here, I think this should be: "In the absence of credit scores, or some other mechanism for comparing potential borrowers". There's lots of ways to compare borrowers, and if you assume credit scores are the only way to do it, all your solutions are going to involve them.

Loans involve the calculation of parameters. You can either choose those implicitly through personal knowledge, or explicitly through a scalar metric (credit score). There is no viable third option, and the first option is just a bad version of the second, in the end.

It's worth pointing out that credit scores actually are actually just the P(^default) expressed on an integer rather than fractional scale.

There's also multiple credit scores, there are the scores computed by credit bureaus which look at your P(default) against all lenders, but many lenders also compute their own internal credit scores using models trained against their own customer base (and possibly also taking into account additional data that they hold about you).

I live in a Central European country.

The other advantage over credit scores is that people willingly give their information out and are able to understand the banks decision.

That's really what's driving support for credit scores, isn't it? That they provide some some people the (perception of an) ability to prove their character, their moral superiority, and to feel rewarded for all their hard sacrifices.

Similar, I believe, to credit cards and all those rewards and air miles shenanigans - everyone feels they're gonna be winners, so they support a private tax on everyone.

For example, credit card points are a zero sum game. Credit scores are not. Everyone could be creditworthy, but many are not, and it’s highly beneficial to the entire system to be able to identify which group a person fits into (including for the person who isn’t creditworthy!)

My mind isn't made on credit scores, though I do feel it might be a case similar to insurance - it's not strictly a zero-sum game, but it's also socially harmful to have such a system be 100% efficient. I.e. with insurance, if everyone was correctly pooled into small bucket that near-perfectly reflects their actual risk profile, insurance would stop making sense - those who need it most wouldn't be able to afford it, and those who could afford it need it the least and would be better off putting that money into savings accounts.

There's a lot of areas in the economy where increasing efficiency past some point just makes systems inhumane and exacerbates social problems.

I feel default risk estimation may just be like that - the more reliable you want your credit score, the more invasive you need to be wrt. what information you collect and how you do it; meanwhile, the system becomes less and less tolerant of mistakes and unfortunate circumstances, while also exerting more control over how people live their lives.

Already the US credit score makes people obsessed about credit, and getting credit cards and loans to improve/game their credit scores with their future mortgage in mind. That very much affects people's life choices at scale. I don't think having everyone leading their lives to optimize their credit score is a way to have a healthy society; conversely, maybe letting the lenders eat a little more risk, and the wealthiest (and most responsible with money, and most morally superior) have a little smaller line, actually improves overall well-being.

> Already the US credit score makes people obsessed about credit, and getting credit cards and loans to improve/game their credit scores with their future mortgage in mind

I've encountered very, very few people doing this to an inappropriate degree (obviously yes you should consistently demonstrate creditworthiness, that's not gaming though). Anecdotally, the people I see doing this are actually seriously not creditworthy. A whole lot of "you bought 3 cars and fucked your score, here's how to dig your way out." But like... the evidence actually shows you can't be trusted with credit!

I don't disagree with any of your big picture concerns about the system and the possible edge cases or distortions of priorities. I just haven't seen evidence those are huge problems relative to the value of the system.

Average interest rate on mortgages in Spain with this system appears to be _half_ that of the US, so it seems this isn't so ineffective that premiums have to spike to match. (is that right? https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-rates/ suggests 6% interest mortgages is a current average in the USA while Spain is below 3% now - personal anecdotes plus gov stats shows 3.25% average on all issued mortgages in 2024: https://ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=Estadistica_...)

Spain also enforces a much stricter debt to income ratio, which means it’s much harder to get loans for people that already have debt, which means the risk profile is reduced for those that do get approved.

Also Spain’s unemployment is among the highest in the EU — and almost three times higher than the U.S., so the central bank’s lower interest rates reflect less of a concern over inflation and more of a concern towards encouraging growth. The low interest rates in Spain aren’t a reflection of reduced risk but of lower central bank rates. You could get 30 year mortgages in the U.S. just a few years ago approaching 2%.

Comparing mortgage rates across countries is a pointless endeavor because the macroeconomic circumstances are vastly different. For example, one would think that lower interest rates would result in a increase of housing supply in Spain as investors build more housing because the loans would be cheaper — however that isn’t the case because of the post-tax return on investment (and regulatory risk) for real estate is far worse than an equivalent investment in the United States despite higher lending costs. A €10 million housing project in Spain has a lower ROI than the same project would in North Carolina. Interest rates could be zero in Spain and it wouldn’t change the housing market much because of the myriad of other factors that go into the spreadsheet.

Also almost all the things GP listed apply all across Europe. So the "Spain character assassination" exercise is pointless.

We do have a centralized registry of "bad debtors" and that has a highly negative effect on your ability to get a loan.

Any EU country - regulations tend to be strict and vary from country to country. There is usually a central registry with either history of violated agreements and/or currently active loans. In pre-approval for a loan the borrower typically self-declares their credit capacity and the lender checks the registry for red flags. Before concluding the approval the lender will require supporting documentation (typically salary certificate, bank statement and/or tax returns).

There are still credit bureaus, and things like defaults, judgements, etc are recorded, and when you apply for credit this is checked.

However there are crucial differences to a score system like the UK and (I assume) the US - there is no 'building good credit', you don't get any benefit from having existing credit products and using them well. In fact the opposite - having other forms of credit like a credit card available is seen as a negative when you apply for a mortgage and will impact the amount you can get loaned. They'll literally knock the credit card limit off the top of the mortgage offer.

In Spain they look at your last few months of bank movements and calculate how much to loan you (usually something like max a third of your income can go to mortgage payments)

There is some risk to the bank because the house may have declined in value and it may be tricky to sell it when you default. That's why they do a risk assessment, but it can be a lot less invasive than for providing a personal loan for an education.

Which is another thing we don't do over here in the EU.

Perhaps what's left doesn't necessitate a full-blown credit score system?

So instead a local credit union got a free $1500 for servicing that loan. A loan that I explicitly only took to "build credit" ie, pay a bank profit so they would vouch for me, which is what a credit score is designed to show, how much profit you give to banks and credit card companies for financing.

They don't want to loan out money that might be less profitable than a loan to someone who has paid a thousand credit card payments.

The credit union then proceeded to Not report my loan to the credit agencies! meaning I still have no credit. Awesome.

But anyway, I wonder what the housing market would do if mortgages weren’t possible to get. I bet the prices would go down.

"Following the Panic of 1837, the first commercial credit reporting organizations formed."

It only took a financial crisis and 3-year-long depression for people to realize that credit is important.

Here in Sweden we don’t have it. When you apply for a new loan the bank can request information of other debts you have. And you have to send info about your income and answer questions about your expenses (living costs, number of children living at home, etc).

In a lot of countries, the only external thing the bank is allowed to use when you apply for a loan is whether or not you have existing loans (which is just to prevent you from borrowing money to pay off other borrowed money), the amount of money you make annually and what you currently have saved up.

That's because it's difficult to imagine how alternative app stores would force first party app stores to be better, or risk losing business. For a start, everything would become much cheaper for you. They would also have a real incentive to provide new features and innovations. You don't have to switch to a third party app store to realize the benefits that follow from allowing them to exist.

That, I doubt. Most stuff already is dirt-cheap on the App Store (and riddled with ads). It’s not like, for example, getting into Apple’s App Store is so expensive that it adds dollars to the price of apps.

Are we using the same App Store? Anything of worth is behind a $10 monthly subscription. Apple has intentionally made subscriptions the only viable commercial model on the App Store. Then they take 30% (with some exceptions). They forbid competition, so developers aren't free to distribute to iOS customers in any other way.

How do you think Apple has done that? They’ve always had the option for a one-time payment for apps, and those can be fairly high ($999,99 until December 2022 and $10,000 after that time, according to https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/6/23496734/apple-app-store-...)

Even if Apple did that, I don’t see any evidence that was intentional.

I think it’s more that the market has spoken, and said that “you can’t sell $100 apps on the App Store”. And even then, there are counterexamples.

The only thing Apple may hav head to do with that is that it ‘gave’ zillions of developers visibility for their $0,99 apps on the App Store. That may have led users to think software should be cheap.

1. They aggressively deprecate and modify endpoints. Microsoft maintains APIs for decades. Apple deprecates and modifies them with frequently little or no warning, necessitating expensive and time-consuming maintenance. This makes the one-time purchase unviable as a business model for developers.

2. Apple doesn't permit paid application upgrades (v2). Everything has to be done with IAP. This means developers can't abandon old versions and start selling and supporting new versions without losing all their SEO, affiliate links, marketing, branding, coupons, etc.

3. Apple doesn't facilitate wishlists, meaning sales are much less effective.

4. By disallowing competition, Apple ensures iPhone users are a captive audience. They can't purchase one-time software elsewhere. They have to accept the subscription to get the most value out of their phones.

This is entirely by design. It's hardly "the market" speaking. There is nothing free about the "market" on iPhones.

It's riddled with adverts because it's the only way to get revenue out of such a terrible system.

"I love valve"

... but they have exactly the same business model, and people genuinely promote valve as if they want it to be a monopoly. (though I am aware that it's not one now- first-party launchers are universally reviled by gamers).

I'm not sure how.

Valve allow you to install whatever game store you want on the Steam Deck. They win custom by making a better experience than everyone else, Apple win because they have formed an environment where you have no other option.

If Apple wanted the same business model, they would allow alternative storefronts, they wouldn't block updates if they decided they didn't like you anymore, and they wouldn't block you from even replacing the OS on the device you bought if you wanted to.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure apart from running stores that they are the same thing at all.

Subs, kinda agree.

Also it's only 30% for the top of the market (15% for a lot of apps), and only for digital goods (so not my banking apps or Amazon), and it has to be stuff bought in app (so not two of my last three employers).

And even 30% was good when it was new. Only looks bad now because the market grew so much — but the market did grow, and I was expecting monopoly action around when they first passed one trillion dollar valuation.

With Epic especially, that felt like one arrogant giant swiping at another giant. Especially due to concerns that Fortnite was designed to be addictive, that loot boxes are gambling.

Or would they stay 99 and thus no change for the consumer?

The DMA is about developer choice, not consumers

Ultimately it is about both. The idea behind that is pretty much the idea of capitalism: competition drives innovation.

While I personally do not care about the alternative stores, I care very much about stuff like the in app purchases. I am not using Apples subscriptions and all the rules and steps to circumvent the rules make it horribly inconvenient to deal with subscriptions.

I also hate the fact that I cannot buy an ebook in app because of Apple‘s 30% cut

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...

I think many, especially smaller, developers don’t realize the value they get for that commission: distribution, payment processing, billing, tax processing/collection, dispute handling, marketing (i.e. a storefront,) management of versions/updates for users, not to mention security benefits (for users.)

If people don’t like that, nothing is stopping them from choosing not to sell to Apple device owners. If Apple device owners don’t like it, they can switch to a competitor.

The whole point of this regulation is to enable both sides to make that choice without having to give up on the iPhone and the rest of their app purchases etc. in that ecosystem.

So now we're competing with the "local grocery store", even on the "information superhighway"?

And for that Apples IAP fee of 30% is about ten times higher than elsewhere.

People say this, but of all the apps I have on my phone, I'm not sure I actually paid for any. Browser, smart-device controllers, a few games, streaming services (that I pay for direct), messengers of various sorts, banking, transport, ticketing, government apps.

I know people must pay for apps as Apple make a lot of money off it, but it's not really something I do.

Besides, we weren’t really talking about lawmakers - the claim was things would get cheaper for you. My point is that for some of us they could not.

> Of the $127 billion in total consumer spending globally in 2024, $91.6 billion came from the App Store, up 24% year-over-year. Google Play consumer spending declined by 1.5% year-over-year to reach $35.7 billion globally.

I can easily find those figures on App Store revenue you gave, and on the proportion of paid apps in the app stores (5% on iOS, less for Android), but not the details on distribution of payments vs number of users or whatever. Do we have a few users spending a lot and lot of users spending little to nothing? Or am I in a tiny minority as implied?

Given there are approx 1.38 billion iOS users, that’s a mean of $60ish per user per year… a few larger users could easily be skewing that.

most app/games etc is freemium and I can tell you that smaller people that pay is subsidies the system because most if not all people using it freely

EU users might be best suited to respond, as they are currently experiencing this change (though I believe the impact will be different once it's rolled out globally).

1. How do you think having multiple app stores will affect user experience and app discoverability? It seems likely that not all apps will be available in every store, meaning users may have to search across multiple platforms to find what they need.

We’ve seen similar issues in the gaming industry, where each company has its own launcher, or in the movie industry, where content is locked behind different providers, making it difficult to figure out where to access it. This is why platforms like Netflix and Steam initially succeeded.

Meanwhile, the Windows/PC model has shown that an open ecosystem can be a security and privacy nightmare for the average user.

2. On that note, how do you envision ensuring privacy and security in these alternative app stores? Risks could range from major tech companies like Google or Facebook running their own stores and collecting even more user data, to scammers creating fake stores that steal credit card information.

The important thing to realise is that no one wanted alternative stores. Not really. What everyone wanted was for the existing store to not be stressful oppressive garbage. If Apple didn’t have draconian rules where they charge too high margins and repeatedly reject apps for stupid petty reasons, they wouldn’t have found themselves in this situation. The other big players would even likely accept having to sell via in-app purchases (offering better consistent protection to consumers) if Apple weren’t egregiously eating into their margins.

Don’t take my word for it, we have (now public) internal emails where Apple executives discuss these very issues and question how long they could keep it up.

Alternative stores were the next best thing. When it became clear that Apple wouldn’t fix their behaviour, the only choice was to fight for legislation where they don’t have as much of a say. Make no mistake, they (Tim Cook in particular) brought it on themselves.

As to your specific questions:

1. App discoverability has been unusable for years. The App Store is the last place where I look for apps.

2. The App Store is already filled with privacy-violating apps and scams. Apple ensures jack shit. Scammers don’t need to create fake stores, they are already doing pretty well for themselves in the main store selling flashlight apps with expensive weekly subscriptions.

Is this situation worse for non-technical users? Maybe. Right now there are big scary warning when trying to add third-party stores, and that does make some sense. But Apple will have to get off their ass and make better privacy protections at the OS level.

Straw man.

> they'd be doing it on whatever app store is available,

But they can't do that, that's the issue.

A large portion of the data that is illegally shared should never have been collected in the first place.

What I would like to see regulated are all those dark-pattern surveillance techniques that are slapped on absolutely everything these days. I’m just looking at a toaster, I don’t want the toaster company looking back at me just because I looked at a fucking toaster once. Makes me weary of looking at stuff. This wasn’t even that freaky pre-AI, but now it’s a whole other ballgame. Stasi would love this stuff.

That's the reason why even with its warts, I have been a very happy Android user. It's my device, and I can modify it to become whatever I want it to be (with some constrains that don't really affect me atm).

Is it my device or not, Apple?

Digital purchases are often subscription based which for physical goods (eg newspapers) is also non transferable (as it does not make much sense). In contrast, “one-of” licences are already transferable mostly. Either because the licence keys is a bearer token or companies support transfer (if you’ve registeted). So you dont accomplish much here, I think, but still I agree it’s a good idea to get the details right and fixed in law.

I've seen this sentiment a couple of times here and I think it's the wrong framing on what the EU is trying to do. Third party app stores aren't the point; they're just a vehicle enabling users to choose which software they want to use without interference from Apple. The indie devs using AltStore PAL don't all necessarily want to use it, but they're forced to because of the way Apple chose to implement DMA compliance.

In fact, the DMA doesn't even explicitly require that gatekeepers allow third party app stores; they can only allow direct distribution (e.g. via web sites) instead, if they want (this is to the best of my understanding of the text, but IANAL).

When you say you don't care about alternative app stores, what you're really saying is that you don't care about the end user's ability to use apps that aren't approved by Apple. That is certainly an opinion that many folks have, but I'd prefer that they refrain from hiding behind the shield of "third party app stores are weird and who even cares", whether deliberately or not.

Is Apple actually complying with the DMA then? They are still requiring notarization, which means apps still have to be approved by them.

End users can (and do!) use apps not approved by Apple on mobile devices every day. They just do it on something that’s not an iPhone (or have the capability to jailbreak their iPhone and know what they’re getting themselves into). Corps and devs can also run custom software without Apple approval. I’m personally fine with that delineation and I’d much rather have stronger GDPR-like and property laws.

> (or have the capability to jailbreak their iPhone and know what they’re getting themselves into)

It is a common misconception that people can "just" jailbreak their iPhone if they're not happy with the walled garden. This requires someone finding a critical-impact zero day vulnerability in iOS, quite literally worth around half a million dollars [1]. Apple is hard at work as we speak trying their hardest to prevent those from slipping in -- and that is a good thing, in general. It's not currently possible to jailbreak any up-to-date iOS device.

I'm all for sandboxing and other iOS security features; I'm not proposing that we get rid of any of that. Sideloaded apps would presumably still be fully sandboxed, and would still only be able to access sensitive data with explicit user consent. This is very different than the situation on Windows, where in 2025 you can still double click an .exe and instantly have all of your passwords and credit cards stolen (not an exaggeration; this literally happens).

I'm also not against the idea of making it difficult enough to enable sideloading so as to make social engineering attacks against grandma effectively impossible. This is what Chromebooks are doing; nerds get root, but grandma doesn't.

However, the DMA is more concerned with delivering alternative apps to everyone than it is concerned with empowering techies. So I can see why you might not support it even if you want to have a little more control over your phone, as a techie.

[1] https://archive.is/9jdW7