Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL

> I know this will not be popular here but I really do not like the EU's most recent round of "no, you have to open up this feature".

The EU did not ask Apple to open up AWDL to competitors, they asked Apple to comply with the Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 standard.

"Asked" might not be the correct word here, "demanded" is more fitting.

I'm pretty torn, and I know this conversation has been beaten to death on HN, and I have nothing new or novel to contribute to it, but even though this pushes Apple in a direction I'd personally like to see them move - it just feels like regulatory overreach.

In Europe we like our regulators to step in and force megacorporations to do the right thing every now and then.

What makes this overreaching? We already regulate RF heavily since it's a shared space that would all go to shit if everyone could roll their own incompatible thing

Apple isn't technically forced to do this, they're an American company. They could instead withdraw entirely from the EU market and then they don't have to follow any EU laws. Of course, Apple will never do that because selling their phones in the EU makes _way_ more money than complying with the regulations will cost them.

The "right thing" is, of course, subjective, but you're completely correct in the wider point. This is something European elected officials have enacted; they were voted into office _by_ Europeans, and if Apple wants to sell their products there, they have to abide by the rules passed there. I completely agree with that. People have the right to decide how companies behave in their countries/regions.

I just personally don't like the idea of governments dictating product decisions when no harm or risk is involved. If Apple wants to sell a product without a feature, it's my belief that they should be able to do that. This is doubly true when Apple developed and patented the feature they're being forced to drop in favor of an implementation they would rather not adopt.

Were you also against the FCC implementing local number portability after Verizon etc refused to hand over your number to a different provider?

The point is that capital incentives alone do not drive interop, and when interop is low, you get stagnating innovation and stifling competition, which leads to customer choice being limited and high prices during the value extraction phase. Just look at the VC world - competition with better product is for losers, all that matters is dominance and ”market share”.

Corporations aren’t alive, they can’t exercise freedoms, they move wherever their incentives dictate. Good regulations like DMA is a tool to make these entities step out of local optima they’re stuck in. (It even helps the affected companies, long term)