Generally, as a society, we hold that a contract cannot be modified without both parties’ agreement. When you bought that phone, it was with the completely clear, overt, and in no way uncertain understanding that it does specifically X Y Z, and does not do A B C. Now, without additional payment to the counterparty, you’re demanding your phone do A B C. What am I missing? According to accepted understandings of contracts, how are you possibly in the right? How are you possibly in a position to demand government use force to modify a contract you accepted before to somehow benefit you more at a cost to your counterparty?
You are of the opinion that it is reasonable for a company to expect you to read, understand and fully agree with a contract that consists of countless pages of opaque legalese and that you have no say in whatsoever, just in order to use a service that's arguably a necessity to participate in public life?
The EU does not seem to share that opinion, and puts some restrictions on these types of 'contracts'. Are you really concerned that this is somehow unfair towards these companies? Companies that retain whole teams of lawyers to create a contract that hardly any of its billion counter parties (individual consumers) can fully comprehend, let alone push back on?
My rant was about the rationale for government restricting ToS contracts in general. Apple is indeed not as unavoidable for participating in public life as some others. The only alternative being 'agreeing to' the Google contract of course.
The parent post said “service that's arguably a necessity to participate in public life”. I’m not sure what universe you live in, but in mine everyday life is entirely possible without iPhones.
I'm not sure what society you are referring to but contracts have to adhere to laws in the EU.
This is also about software that is being updated. So the transaction is not completed yet. Apple could probably go the route of not providing the update to phones that were sold before the law was voted on/in place. I would guess that would lead to other legal battles.
And is it reasonable that the laws are created after the contract was already agreed to and still apply to it? At least here in the United States, laws are not allowed to make things illegal that happened before the laws were written.
If I have a sales contract with you where I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, and on Monday hamburgers are outlawed, I still owe you on Tuesday. If purchases or hamburgers on credit is outlawed on Monday, I most likely still owe you on Tuesday.
Otoh, if I pay you today for a hamburger on Tuesday, and on Monday hamburgers are outlawed, you can't perform your part of the contract, and we'll need to figure things out.
The rules can change, and when the rules change, continuing service may need to change (depending on how the rules were written); I'm sure part of the contracts involved also describe a) how to make changes in the services, b) what happens when parts of the contract are discovered to be unenforcable or illegal.
Laws can definitively be retroactive or affect existing contracts. Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior if it was ever baked into private contracts ?
Also the DMA didn't fall from the sky one day and enforced the next. Every business impacted had years to do something about it, and they preferred to play chicken race instead.
> Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior
They DO have the power to STOP it, they just cannot punish past behaviour which was legal at the time! At least in USA, this is directly in the constitution:
Article 1 § 9 prohibits Congress from passing any laws which apply ex post facto.
Article 1 § 10 prohibits the states from passing any laws which apply ex post facto.
SCOTUS also clarified this in Beazell v. Ohio:
"It is settled, by decisions of this Court so well known that their citation may be dispensed with, that any statute which punishes as a crime an act previously committed, which was innocent when done, which makes more burdensome the punishment for a crime, after its commission, or which deprives one charged with crime of any defense available according to law at the time when the act was committed, is prohibited as ex post facto."
Now, I know that this is EU and not USA, but my argument is that EU is the ones being unreasonable here. It is illogical to make something illegal and then punish those who had done it before it was made so.
There's a range of anti-competitive behavior which can subvert that ideal, and as such there's regulation aimed to prevent it. Apple used to forbid apps from telling users about Apple's 30% cut or cheaper places to buy the app, for instance, hindering users from making an informed choice.
Many of the policies in question are intentionally not publicized to end-users, often requiring first paying to be part of the developer program before you can even see what you need to agree to to publish an app.
> Apple allows no-questions-asked full-refund returns for two weeks.
That's the bare legal minimum in the EU. Many anti-competitive practices are not things consumers find out about within some short fixed period of time, if at all, and others are not solved by a refund even when the customer is aware of the issue.
True that it does now all (including schedules 2/3 and the guidelines) appear to be publicly available. Looks as if this was done on June 7th 2021, shortly after the EU Commission had sent the Statement of Objections on April 30th 2021.
