On Tuesday, the European Parliament presented the statutory review of the Digital Markets Act. So, naturally, I went to Strasbourg to tell politicians that as DMA has only really been in force for two years, it’s probably too early to make any amendments. And while it’s been quite successful so far, we really need the Commission to enforce it more vigorously. (Many MEPs agree; last week, the European Parliament’s Internal Market (IMCO) committee called for the “full and proactive use” of all the Digital Market Act tools, and encourage the EU to resist external political pressure.)
As an independent European browser, Vivaldi needs access to platform controlled by vendors of competing browsers. It’s ridiculous that Apple is still able to impose impossible conditions on anyone who wishes to use their preferred browser engines on i(Pad)OS, and that Microsoft is still able to self-preference its own Edge browser on Windows.
If Europe is to achieve real digital sovereignty, the EU needs to monitor compliance -not just believe the Gatekeepers marking their own homework- and have the courage to impose real sanctions against Big Tech’s attempts to smother European compeititors.
I arrived the evening before my meeting, so had a while to look around Strasbourg, which was pretty.
And while Strazzy is (currently) in France, it has a heartily Germanic side to its cuisine. My dinner comprised most of a pig cooked in beer, and about a kilo of roasted potatoes (plus a salad and some bread):
The European Parliament was cool, and it made me sad that the UK is no longer included. Whatever the British Right may think of the European Project, Europe hasn’t forgotten the contribution that Britain made to ensuring a democratic Europe.
Let’s hope Europe is courageous against modern fascists and their industrialist friends as it was 80 years ago.
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released Vivaldi 7.9, with even more personalistion and zero “A.I.”, because it’s cream of the crop, not a stream of the Slop.
HTML in canvas – “There’s a new WICG proposal that lets you render real, interactive HTML elements into a <canvas>. including WebGL and WebGPU contexts. I spent a few days building demos with it.”
Amazon is cutting off support for older Kindles – but don’t worry! Bountiful beneficent Bezos is “encouraging” you to buy a new one with a 20% discount, so just drop your old one in a canal, or hoik it at a baby eagle, or bash an otter to death with it. Or, if you’re really evil, you could jailbreak it so you can continue to read books you already own on a device you already own.
I Decompiled the White House’s New App – “The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes, and loads JavaScript from some guy’s GitHub Pages”
The AI Great Leap Forward by Han Lee. “In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.”
The whole world is on the streets, delirious with joy, as today one of the world’s largest companies turns 50 years old. The web is full of reminiscences about Apple products and Saint Steve, such as Apple at 50: My 10 most memorable moments. I haven’t been an Apple user for as long as many have, so here are my five top Apple memories.
The time Apple lied to the UK regulator
That hilarious time when Apple engineers added code to the Safari’s settings page to hide the option to change the default browser if Safari was the default, but then to prominently show it if another browser was the default. And then silently fixed it and lied to the UK regulator, pretending it never happened! Oh, how we all laughed.
The time when Apple told the EU that Safari is 3 different browsers
When Apple tried to shut the UK investigation down
Not-Steve’s minions went to the Competition Appeal tribunal and got the UK regulator’s Market Investigation Report dismissed, not by arguing before the tribunal that the CMA was substantially wrong about any of its anti-competitive behaviour, but on a legal technicality based around the timing of the opening of the investigation. This was reversed when the regulator went to the Court of Appeal. How we chuckled at Apple’s zillion dollar lawyers flushing taxpayers’ money down the iToilet!
When Apple’s VP of Finance got caught lying under oath
To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate…
Apple employees attempted to mislead the Court by testifying that the decision to impose a commission was grounded in AG’s report. The testimony of Mr. Roman, Vice President of Finance, was replete with misdirection and outright lies.
The one when Apple tried to wreck all EU Web Apps
Apple doesn’t want PWAs to open in third-party browsers that have more powerful features than Safari, because those would directly compete with native apps in its own App Store. However, in the EU, it can’t privilege PWAs in Safari with its own private APIs any more. And so its solution, in its spirit of malicious compliance, was to break all PWAs in the EU, just before the Digital Markets Act came into force, and claim that the DMA required it.
“Contrary to Apple’s public representation, the removal of Home Screen Web Apps on iOS in the EU was neither required, nor justified, under the Digital Markets Act”, a commission spokesperson said.
Who knows what the next 50 years have in store for Not-Steve and his successors? I’m old enough to remember when it was inconceivable that behemoths like BlackBerry or Nokia could disappear. Now we think differently.
Meanwhile… Inside the far-right network targeting Europe’s digital rules – “The Trump administration and a network of far-right think tanks are increasingly targeting the EU’s digital regulations and rules on content moderation. Far-right MEPs have taken over these narratives, while tech companies are hoping to exploit the opportunity.”
North Carolina Man Pleads Guilty To Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence – He used Slop-generators to create hundreds of thousands of “songs”, and bots to stream those slongs billions of times, collecting $8m in royalties. It’s the perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism: burning forests to generate fake songs to stream by robots that can’t hear, endlessly, while artists starve.
Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website – “a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google’s machine learning model thinks they should see instead.”
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released a Vivaldi desktop snapshot, with a new onboarding step for people who have visual impairments, require keyboard-only access or use assistive technologies. Feedback would be most welcome.
Link o’ the week: Request for developer feedback: focusgroup – “The focusgroup HTML attribute is a proposed declarative way to add keyboard arrow-key navigation to composite widgets such as toolbars, tablists, menus, listboxes, etc. without writing any roving-tabindex JavaScript. One attribute replaces hundreds of lines of boilerplate.” – This is exciting,so kudos to the Microsoft Edge team and the Open UI Group for their work on this. Darwin knows, I give Microsoft a lot of grief for their management’s antics, but I have a whole lotta love for their web platform team.
The Enshittificator – a short Norwegian documentary about the life of an Enshittificator, and how the Internet and AI has enhanced his productivity.
Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native – “API-wise, native apps lost to web apps a long time ago. Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform”. (Ignore the reference to everyone’s favourite way to target 100 Iranian schoolgirls for shredding.)
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released Vivaldi 7.8 for mobile, with even more personalistion and zero “A.I.”, because it’s cream of the crop, not a stream of the Slop.
Addicted to the algorithm: how Big Tech lobbies to keep us hooked on social media “As the EU prepares the Digital Fairness Act (DFA) to tackle the addictive nature of social media design, big tech companies are coming together to aggressively protect their business models. With Trumpists and far-right allies likely to join the chorus against the DFA, the Commission’s own drive for deregulation at all costs is not helping the chances of strong legislation.”
TL;DR: If Apple decides to kick you in the face, it must give you 5 minutes notice. And if you think it was too hard a kick, you can complain to Apple, which will investigate Apple. If the CMA believes Apple routinely gives you less than 5 minutes notice, or routinely kicks you too hard, and Apple’s thorough and impartial investigation of Apple finds no good reason, CMA will consider thinking about contemplating beginning a process to give Apple a really, really strong telling-off.
that, after careful consideration, we think could address our concerns in relation to these matters quickly, effectively and proportionately. This is on the basis that the proposed commitments include robust transparency and oversight measures, so that the CMA and other stakeholders can monitor how Apple and Google are delivering on the commitments and their effectiveness.
Five years after the CMA began investigating competition in the mobile ecosystem, this feels pretty weak to me.
Tom Smith, who is a competition lawyer at Geradin Partners and a former CMA director (so is 76 times cleverer than me) wrote
the CMA isn’t actually proposing any formal conduct requirements at all. They are proposing to accept non-binding commitments from Google and Apple that they will run a fairer app review process and be fairer in how they rank apps in the app stores. Oh, and Apple is promising to consider interoperability requests fairly and objectively 😉 🤞 …
It’s also deeply misleading for the CMA to describe these promises as “commitments”, which is a word with actual legal meaning (and legal enforceability) in the pro-competitive interventions process and in competition enforcement cases under the Competition Act.
Our immediate focus in this area will be on considering improvements to the process by which app developers can request interoperable access to key functionality within Apple’s mobile operating systems (Category 1). Whilst the aim would not be to create a default interoperability requirement, it would aim to ensure that Apple’s decisions in respect of interoperability requests are fair, transparent and objective.
Quite why the CMA does not aim to create a default interoperability requirement is beyond my small brain to fathom. But even within this very lightweight framing, Apple’s commitments are hugely underwhelming. From their document:
Apple will launch a dedicated interoperability feedback channel for developers to submit interoperability requests to Apple…
The feedback channel will be available to developers that are members in good standing of the Developer Program and whose account membership with the Developer Program is registered in the UK (“Eligible Developers”).
If your customers are in UK, but your developers aren’t, bad luck – no interop for you!
Vivaldi browser (who I work for) has a Developer Program enterprise account that is global, and registered in Norway, as that’s where we’re headquartered. We have many UK users, but presumably we couldn’t request interoperability with an iOS service, and neither could a browser based in San Francisco, or Mountain View. To the best of my knowledge, the only UK-based browsers are my colleagues in the Browser Choice Alliance, Wavebox and Waterfox, which are both desktop browsers.
(CMA says elsewhere in its Other work planned for 2026 “We expect to progress work in relation to Apple concerning browsers (removal of the WebKit restriction) as well as interoperable access to functionality for connected devices”. But that’s only expected, and no further details are available.)
However, assume you are a UK developer and want to interoperate with an iOS service – for example, AirDrop. Apple says,
Apple will make clear the kinds of requests that are eligible for consideration under the feedback channel, namely requests for access to equivalent system and hardware functionality used by Apple services or accessories.
So far, so good: if an Apple service or Apple accessory (e.g. watch) can access some iOS function, you should be able to do so too. But (you knew there would be a “but”, didn’t you?):
Apple will assess eligible requests against the following set of criteria: (i) expected user and developer uptake; (ii) alignment with Apple’s platform priorities; (iii) potential implementation costs; (iv) potential impact on user experience, performance/battery, security, safety, privacy, integrity, and accessibility; and (v) potential impact on Apple’s intellectual property rights.
Hang on: Apple can deny a competitor access to an existing iOS service, if it decides there won’t be enough user uptake? Then why did it implement it in the first place? If access to a feature, that Apple has already implemented and uses in its own products, doesn’t align “with Apple’s platform priorities”, why did they add that feature to their platform? Who judges “impact on user experience”? What does “integrity” mean? (It’s in pretty short supply in Cupertino these days.)
Receiving a request through the feedback channel will not create any obligation or expectation that Apple will commit to building a specific requested feature … which will remain at Apple’s discretion in line with its commercial strategy and priorities.
Apple’s commercial strategy has always been to maintain its monopoly, and its priorities haven’t changed since Saint Steve wrote in 2010
Tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem
So if Apple denies your request to access AirDrop (or whatever) because allowing you to compete isn’t “in line with its commercial strategy and priorities”, that’s OK, according to commitments which the CMA thinks “could address our concerns”?
We will move quickly to bring forward conduct requirements, including considering whether more stringent measures are necessary, if these commitments are not adhered to or we find they are proving ineffective. For example, if we find Apple is routinely declining interoperability requests without good reason, this will inform our pipeline of wider work – and we could bring forward specific interoperability requirements.
There are far stricter requirements for Apple in the EU, yet Apple is jizzing out European lawsuits left right and centre to avoid competition. So in UK, I expect a few months (years?) of Apple wriggling to avoid allowing meaningful iOS competition, until CMA receives so many complaints that it begins a ponderous investigation to impose some actual conduct requirements. And all that time, UK app developers suffer, UK consumers get less choice, and Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Any delay is a victory, for a monopolist.
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We build a browser that’s cream of the crop, not a stream of the Slop.
New Social Web Working Group at W3C – “One Community Group document that will be moving into the Working Group is LOLA…. LOLA lets users move from one ActivityPub server to another while retaining all their social connections, their content, and their reactions. It’s a great improvement for data portability on the social web.”
Introducing the <geolocation> HTML element – Wave goodbye to more tedious JS boilerplate code. As far as I’m concerned, UI stuff should all be declarative. Save JS for business logic (or React, if you want an incredibly slow site to annoy users or you’re showcasing your new loading spinner designs)
Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud – Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider
related: Getting off US tech: a guide – Personally, I’m not comfortable framing it as “dropping US tech services”. It’s not about nationalism, or boycotting specific nations for me; it’s about controlling your own data (or your nation controlling its own data) rather than it being strip-mined by TechBros.
Extracting books from production language models [PDF] – “We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from jailbroken Claude…substantial proportions of the book from Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 and notably do not need to jailbreak them to do so”
European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy – The EU is working on what is in essence a new Open Source strategy for Europe, and the call for evidence is now open. If you’re a European hippie communist, you can provide input.
Because I’m so the rock ‘n’ roll, I’ve been reading the summary of responses to the first review of the Digital Markets Act. There were “450 contributions submitted by a broad range of interested parties, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), gatekeepers, civil society organisations, academics, and individual citizens”.
The report contains many surprises. Some of them might shock you.
Several respondents argued that fines so far have been too slow to deter non-compliance while penalties for repeat non-compliances should be higher.
But – surprise!
Gatekeepers, in contrast, argued for proportionate fines, based on EU revenues only and only for deliberate or repeated violations.
The summary continues:
Business users, SMEs, civil society, and some legal experts expressed concerns that public summaries of compliance reports lack sufficient detail, are not independently verified, and do not provide meaningful information for assessing outcomes.
But – surprise!
Gatekeepers on the other hand emphasised the significant resources invested in compliance but argued that overly prescriptive reporting expectations could limit flexibility
Many respondents reported early positive effects of the DMA:
more consistent browser and app-choice opportunities, the ability to uninstall default applications, the emergence of alternative app marketplace options on Apple’s iOS, more freedom regarding app distribution … and new data portability solutions …
many respondents agreed that, to contribute to achieving the DMA’s objective of fairer and more contestable digital markets, enforcement of the DMA needs to be sustained, effective and well-resourced
But – surprise!
Gatekeepers and several respondents affiliated to gatekeepers voiced a number a criticisms notably regarding negative impact on innovation and user experience, as well as concerns that implementation of certain obligations is disproportionate.
TL;DR: most people think DMA is starting to work, and want more.
But – surprise! – massive corporations with profits as large as small nations, derived from years of monopolistic rent extraction, are Very Sad. Obeying laws is tricky, and can cost almost as much as their Chief Counsel’s mahogany desk. And how can they guarantee your comfort and security if they can’t control what is (allegedly) your machine?
