The Washington Post editorial board yesterday (News+ link), “Why Europe Won’t Have the New Siri: Brussels insists the decision is “
[Apple’s and Apple’s only]” and that nothing in its flagship Digital Markets Act forbids the launch. That’s technically true and wholly beside the point.The law requires that the moment Siri AI ships in Europe, any rival AI agent must get the same sweeping access to a user’s messages, files and chat history. Apple proposed putting in a software security layer to make that safe and offered a phased rollout to build it. According to Apple, the European Commission
[rejected the proposal].The DMA was supposed to
[open markets]. But its legal logic was born in the era of browsers, app stores and messaging apps. These components can be swapped like batteries.
The DMA effectively demands everything to be swappable/interchangeable. So the European Commission is correct that the DMA does not forbid Apple from launching a version of Siri AI, it clearly forbids Apple from launching the version of Siri AI they actually built.
Behind all this lies the dream that Europe could be a “
[regulatory superpower].” It wanted to create a market too big to skip that would, by virtue of its heft, end up exporting its rules to the rest of the world. That hasn’t worked out.When adapting a product for Europe costs more than European market access is worth, companies no longer comply. They simply leave out the feature.
That’s the folly of the DMA, or at least the maximal interpretation of the DMA that the European Commission is pursuing. It only makes sense under the assumption that the EU is too big a market to ignore, and the EU’s market might is such that systems will be designed to meet their compliance standards, regardless if the makers of these systems support the regulations or not. (And in the case of Apple with iOS and Google with Android, the two companies are in lockstep in their opposition to the EU’s regulations on system-level AI interoperability.)
First, the EU is big but it isn’t that big. The best estimate I’ve seen is that the EU accounts for about 7% of Apple’s worldwide revenue. Plus, because of the DMA, the cost of doing business in the EU is now significantly more expensive for Apple and Google, because they need to engineer DMA-compliant versions of various features and systems. Unless, that is, they stop bringing a long and ever-growing list of new features to the EU.
Which brings me to my second point. What exactly is the motivation for Apple and Google to engineer entirely separate systems for the EU to bring new features into compliance with the Commission’s broad interpretation of the DMA? Because if Apple doesn’t engineer a DMA-compliant version of Siri AI, iOS users in the EU will ... switch to Android, whose system-level AI was deemed noncompliant by the Commission a few months ago?
This doesn’t directly hurt Apple. It doesn’t force Apple to design, engineer, and ship a compliant EU-exclusive version of Siri AI that supports plug-and-play LLM back ends. It only hurts iPhone users who live in the EU, who are stuck with the old dumb version of Siri for the foreseeable future. The European Commission is either stupid or insane.