I don’t see how it would ever make sense to hold social media liable for user posted defamation.
Look at the recent Afroman defamation lawsuit and consider how YouTube is supposed to know whether that music video was defamatory or not. It took a court 3 years to reach a conclusion but you want YouTube to make that same call instantly, on millions of posts a day. What you’d get is a world where Afroman’s (non defamatory) speech basically cannot be shared on social media at all.
I think the difference should be whether they are a dumb pipe, or whether they exercise editorial control and/or promote some content over others.
If you are truly a dumb pipe, that just transmits whatever the users post, then you shouldn't be liable for what goes over your wires. Like the phone company.
As soon as you start acting as an editor: amplifying some content and downplaying (or removing) other content, re-ordering it, ranking it, and so on, then you are placing your name on the content and in a sense should share liability around it.
Companies should have to deliberately decide who they are going to be: are they just wires like the phone company, or are they a newspaper's letters-to-the-editor department? They shouldn't be able to act like one, but have the liability of the other.
That seems unworkable because, well, I just don’t want social media to be dumb pipes. Without sites making editorial decisions every site will be full of porn and animal torture videos. The current status quo seems way better tbh.
This was what GFiber appeared to be doing until it sold out to private equity. I got about 60 DMCA notice emails about torrents that never reached seeding state. About 25% of them were false accusations with wrong titles unrelated to activity by anyone on my network.
Actually, it looks like there is something in the law that only provides DMCA safe harbor to providers that have a policy of terminating accounts of repeat infringers. I'm still not sure if an ISP would even need that safe harbor though.
I don’t think so. They need to have the policy of terminating accounts and actually terminate a subset of them. They just can’t be held liable for not terminating all of them.
> The Fourth Circuit’s holding went beyond the two forms of liability recognized in Grokster and Sony by holding that “supplying a product with knowledge that the recipient will use it to infringe copyrights is . . . sufficient for contributory infringement.” 93 F. 4th 222, 236. This holding went beyond the two bases for contributory liability recognized in the Court’s precedent and conflicted with the Court’s repeated admonition that contributory liability cannot rest only on a provider’s knowledge of infringement and insufficient action to prevent it. Pp. 9–10.
> (c) Sony argues that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe harbor—under which Internet service providers cannot be secondarily liable for certain forms of copyright infringement if they have implemented “a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders” who “are repeated infringers,” 17 U. S. C. §512(i)(1)(A)—would have no effect if Internet service providers are not liable for providing Internet service to known infringers. The DMCA does not expressly impose liability for Internet service providers who serve known infringers; it merely creates new defenses from liability for such providers. The DMCA itself made clear that failure to comply with the safe-harbor rules “shall not bear adversely upon . . . a defense by the service provider,” as here, “that the service provider’s conduct is not infringing.” §512(l). P. 10.
But there is a difference between “illegal to regurgitate it” and “illegal to remember it”. IIRC in this case that settled the judge had ruled on “remember” (fair use) but not on the other.
As described in the ruling, Apple hired a consulting group to estimate how much value developers get from the iphone platform, which found that
(1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue.
(2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%.
(3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%.
(4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14%.
Then Apple claimed this study was how they came up with the 27%, but the Judge basically said nah you guys came up with that number before the study, and you even know it would be a non-starter for almost all developers.
> Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%
That must be a joke. Xcode is so bad, compared to Android Studio, it’s not even funny. As iOS dev I have to constantly apologize to my Android team members, that, no, Xcode can’t do this and that, and, no, we can’t do X in the build pipeline. And I‘m generally 10-20% slower than them because the tooling is just terrible and flaky.
BTW there was a promising IntelliJ option for Apple development, but Apple made life so hard for them that they had to give up. It was called „AppCode“ and some people are still sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.
It made me laugh, if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup), you better really invest in those developer tools to show it off because the sad state of xcode really isn't showing that.
I don't know where this money is going but certainly not in the developer tooling because it's absolutely terrible
If Apple were worth 30% of revenue, then they'd have no problem allowing competing app stores on their devices, because they support their rate with their value.
The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.
I thought Apple's argument was that the 30% pays for iOS itself, not that the 30% pays for the App Store. Under that theory there's no reason to allow other app stores.
They used to do that back when the iPhone first came out. I don’t think anybody liked that better, and having people hang around on older iOS versions was (and still is) bad for security.
iPhones never had paid iOS upgrades. iPod touch did, but that's because Apple was worried free updates would violate an accounting rule. Specifically, the iPhone was considered subscription revenue while the iPod touch was considered purchase revenue. And after an accounting scandal[0] GAAP had been changed so that you couldn't say you sold, say, a bunch of stuff that hadn't actually been finished yet, and then finish it later with, say, a software update.
This is, of course, how basically every tech company works nowadays[1], because Apple lobbied to have that accounting rule removed.
None of this has anything to do with "App Store pays for iOS". That's an excuse Apple came up with after Epic Games sued them, there's no point in time I can point to where iOS is just the bundled OS vs. "paid for with app sales". The reality is, everything pays for everything, because Apple only sells fully bundled experiences. Their opposition to sideloading or third-party iOS app stores is only somewhat related to security[2], and more related to the fact that they don't want anyone dictating to them how the customer experience is, even if those changes improve the experience.
Well, that, and the fact that they make bank off App Store apps.
Steam takes a 30% cut, but it's actually apparently worth it for discovery and low-friction sales alone, since developers still sell on Steam when the PC is an open platform with competing storefronts with lower cuts.
Steam also reduces their cut down to 25/20% at $10m/$50m in sales, whereas Apple reduces it to 15% only for devs under $1m/yr. A small number of games/apps make the vast majority of revenue so Steam's average cut is likely considerably lower in practice.
> if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup)
Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.
...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".
Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.
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There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.
> because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions
Well no, the most secure platform in 2025 is still the web. You can't get as much data in a web browser as you can in a mobile app and the sandboxing is tighter.
And I may mention that the majority of the appstore revenue comes from casino like games, not really something I would give it to my family.
And sure, I'm opened to the idea that the appstore was innovative in 2008, unfortunately for Apple, we're now in 2025 and it clearly isn't anymore.
> Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store
The first iPhone indie devs were Mac indie devs who already knew Objective-C and Cocoa and Xcode and paid 0% to Apple on the Mac.
At the time, the Verizon/Qualcomm BREW platform had absurd levels of revenue sharing: Up to 90% (!!!) went to the carrier unless you were big enough to negotiate a specific deal.
2010: "Man, charging people money to install software on a feature-phone they bought is kinda fucked up. Both companies are in the wrong for doing that."
2025: "You don't appreciate how lower publishing fees foster competition, except when there's no fees at all, because that's too competitive for the OEM."
The funny thing is that the companies that stand to benefit the most from this and that move the most money (Netflix, Spotify, Fortnite) need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the least.
Indeed. I’d add a fourth category: the medium-to-long tail of ad-infested casino games for children. None of those apps are successful because of the App Store. People don’t generally start at the App Store and go looking for games like this. They are all installed from CPI ads in other ad-infested apps or on websites.
Apple is exactly like a mobster demanding a cut for “protection” — except they’ve designed and controlled the system so well that your business just cannot exist in the first place until your automatic extortion payment system is in place.
They don't. Nobody heard about Netflix and Spotify from randomly browsing App Store(Do people even browse app store feeds to see what to download?). Almost every users of them would likely have searched for it.
Maybe I should have said "_don't_ need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution" rather than "need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the _least_", but I think we agree.
For "discovery" people would have to regularly check the App Store app and read the "today" page. Maybe perhaps Spotify or Netflix will appear there once a year among 15000 stories about games.
Or you mean search? If people search for Spotify/Netflix, they already know about it. And right now Apple will helpfully cover half of the screen with an ad for Gmail if you search for Spotify (and will hide all other Spotify apps like Spotify Kids and Spotify for Creators six screens down)
if you take the high end for all of these points, Apple is claiming 74% of the revenue is thanks to them.
Also, there's a certain level of 'hand-waving' here where if you're developing for iOS you're almost forced to have Apple hardware in the first place to run+test (hell, even Android can be dev'd from almost anything...)
"To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied
under oath"
Yikes. I really thought Apple was going to get away with all their crazy restrictions they came up with after the previous ruling (and maybe they still will, who knows) but this looks pretty bad for them.
"In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. 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."
I hope this guy gets hit with the full extent of the law. Not because I think he is a bad person, but because allowing individuals to be sheltered by corporations is at the core of why corps do illegal or legally grey things.
The right to forget is about removing personal information from a site, or removing articles about you from search results. An answer to a Stackoverflow question isn't really personal info.
I was responsible for drawing 1/25th of this gif back in the day. There was actually way more tiles created but this is one version that went viral. Crazy to see it still pop up like this every couple of years.
It's fairly accurate though. The preliminary injunction in that case blocked government agencies from even talking to social media companies (though some of that got reversed by the 5th circuit).
Look at the recent Afroman defamation lawsuit and consider how YouTube is supposed to know whether that music video was defamatory or not. It took a court 3 years to reach a conclusion but you want YouTube to make that same call instantly, on millions of posts a day. What you’d get is a world where Afroman’s (non defamatory) speech basically cannot be shared on social media at all.
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