John Gruber in 2020 on the tracking industry led by Facebook:
The entitlement of these fuckers is just off the charts. They have zero right, none, to the tracking they’ve been getting away with. We, as a society, have implicitly accepted it because we never really noticed it. You, the user, have no way of seeing it happen. Our brains are naturally attuned to detect and viscerally reject, with outrage and alarm, real-world intrusions into our privacy. Real-world marketers could never get away with tracking us like online marketers do… Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it. They talk in circles but their argument boils down to entitlement: they think our privacy is theirs for the taking because they’ve been getting away with taking it without our knowledge, and it is valuable. No action Apple can take against the tracking industry is too strong.
John Gruber in 2024, on the EU's actions which limit Facebook's ability to track users:
What makes this all the more outrageous is that many major publishers in the EU use this exact same “pay or OK” model to achieve GDPR compliance — and none offer a free alternative with non-targeted ads. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Der Spiegel to offer free access without ads. Christ, they don’t even let you look at their homepage without paying or consenting to targeted ads. And Spotify quite literally brags about its ad targeting. But Spotify is an EU company, so of course it wasn’t designated as a “gatekeeper” by the protection racketeers running the European Commission… They’re not saying “pay or OK” is illegal. They’re saying it’s illegal only if you’re a big company from outside the EU with a very popular platform.
I wonder what happened to turn John's attitude from “no action Apple can take against the tracking industry is too strong” to defending Facebook's “right” to choose how it invades people's privacy? Or is he suggesting that a private company is entitled to defend people's privacy, but governments are not?
And John's second point about Spotify fundamentally misunderstands the nature of antitrust law in general and the EU gatekeeper system specifically. In competition, actions which are legal when you're not a monopoly become illegal when you are a monopoly.
In particular, Apple – and Facebook – are gatekeepers because they “are digital platforms that provide an important gateway between business users and consumers – whose position can grant them the power to act as a private rule maker, and thus creating a bottleneck in the digital economy”. Spotify is not in that position. Der Spiegel is not in that position. Different rules apply – as they do to Tidal (not an EU company), and of course to the New York Times.
This really is not difficult to understand.
But underneath this in part is John's feeling that EU antitrust law is all an EU conspiracy to attack American companies. That would be news to Daimler, fined over a billion euros for an illegal cartel. It would news to Scania, fined 880m euro. To DAF, fined 715m euro. To Phillips, fined 705m euro. And so on. The EU fines European companies big sums of money all the time for breaking competition law.
The entire point of the EU is to create single, competitive markets. It does not allow big companies to “own” markets because free markets (in the EU's eyes) are good, and privately owned ones that allow big companies to stop being capitalists and act like feudal lords are bad. Facebook, Apple, and the rest have been doing this in digital for a long time, and the EU has decided it's going to stop.
