Non experts have to rule on expert subjects all the time - sometimes this goes hilariously wrong (like the internet being a series of tubes) but usually what happens is that the non-expert relies on the testimony of experts to make their judgement.
Politicians aren't expected to be experts due to the immense breadth of subjects they need to consider - they're expected to consult experts. Whether an individual politician is an expert[1] is pretty irrelevant.
All of these statements are about our general expectations of politicians - whether you think politicians adhere to that point or have comments on specific politicians is beside the scope of my comment. As a less controversial example it might be good to instead consider how judges operate who are expected to provide well reasoned judgements on subjects they know nothing about.
1. Sometimes those former expert politicians are the worst of all since they _think_ they know the way things are and won't listen to actual experts but they've been out of the industry so long that they've lost their familiarity with the subject.
>sometimes this goes hilariously wrong (like the internet being a series of tubes)
That didn't go hilariously wrong, though - the internet is a series of tubes. Not physically (copper cables aren't tubes) but he obviously wasn't talking about specific stuff but broad-strokes analogy (his exact line was "It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes."), and his description was basically accurate.
Any fundamental correctness of their viewpoint is by virtue of them representing more people (EU citizens) than Apple's CEO represents (himself and, I guess, the Apple corporation, if you count that). On moral issues, the fundamentally "correct" viewpoint (if there is one) is, by definition, the one that more people say is the fundamentally "correct" viewpoint.
Thank you for your comment. In the spirit of interpreting it in the most charitable way possible, I assume that when you say "China", you mean the Chinese government. The answer is that Chinese government doesn't necessarily represent people living in China. As you say, it is not democratic. That leaves us with few indicators of representation.
It has control over the people living in China, true, but I do not think controlling a person, being able to put them in jail if they don't obey you, is the same thing as representing them.
Governments in other countries have come to a different view, and it's for Apple to determine how worth it is for them to conform to the view come to by the representatives of the EU citizens versus catering to markets with other regulatory regimes.
What you should be comparing is the percentage of the market the EU represents in the total market available to Apple. EU politicians are accountable to their population. Apple’s CEO is accountable to every Apple customer. The EU does not now, nor has it ever, constituted a majority of Apple revenue.
I'd argue that's not the case. CEO's are accountable to share holders, not its customers. And before you say its the same thing, there are a lot of pubically traded companies who get away with unlawful actions that direct effect its customer's for a long, long time without their bottom line being effected.
So you think government can prove morality, but markets cannot? If you don't think government is a marketplace where the currency is political capital, then you have a naive view of how governments work. Also, I don't believe the EU is a direct democracy, so the representative morality is lossy. Have you never disagreed with a decision made by a politician you voted for?
I'm saying that customers decide whether or not to buy from Apple based on whether they resonate with them from a moral standpoint, at least as part of their decision to purchase their products. And I said Apple's CEO is accountable to their customers, not that they represent them. Yes, they're also accountable to shareholders, as your sibling comment points out. But if the company screws up enough to elicit a popular boycott, you can bet the reason shareholders will be exercising that accountability is due to the actions of the customer base.
Yes, a democratic government represents the people, and thus their moral stance. A market sells stuff. There's really no relationship between the two nouns. No reason to compare them. You might as well ask, "So the people can decide what's moral, but a jar of pickles can't?" Yes, that's correct. A jar of pickles is technically a market, so this analogy applies particularly well.
> I'm saying that customers decide whether or not to buy from Apple based on whether they resonate with them from a moral standpoint
I fully believe that you might do that yourself. There's no evidence everyone else does, or even that a majority do. Especially since most people aren't informed of working conditions involved in manufacturing Apple products (or indeed, many others' products).
It's just not believable that everyone thinks that buying a product = agreeing with every single moral stance made by the person currently running the company. And what if he changed his mind tomorrow? Would he offer a full refund to everybody who asked for one?
> And I said Apple's CEO is accountable to their customers, not that they represent them.
He's not accountable to them, only to the board*, but we're discussing representation - that is, speaking on behalf of a people, according to those people, not you or I or the speaker individually. If you mentioned accountability while we were on the topic of representation, and I returned us to the topic of representation, you're welcome :)
[*]: Your example illustrates this: a complex chain of accountability from CEO to Corporation and BoD to Corporation and Corporation to shareholders is required for any action to happen. Being accountable to customers means customers can decide to fire him _directly_.
> you mentioned accountability while we were on the topic of representation
Because they are interrelated concepts. Without accountability you can’t be trusted to faithfully represent someone. “Representation” without accountability is autocracy.
You are right, they may relate, and thus can be easy to confuse for each other when one is being discussed. So we have to be extra careful when bringing one up in a discussion about the other.
In this case, though, the CEO is not accountable to customers, and the CEO does not represent customers, so not too confusing. He is accountable to the BoD (nobody else can fire him) and represents the corporation. The interests of other parties, including customers, are secondary to, and when opposed lose to, the interests of the corporation.
Yeah, as I’ve said before: the root problem here is that the EU wants to outlaw apples business model.
People don’t think of it that way, they tell themselves all the reasons why that’s a good thing, but that’s ultimately what it is - a legislative solution to end the “android vs iOS” debate for all time.
The argument is walled gardens shouldn’t exist, so the solution is to either legislate requirements that apple destroy the walls, or that they exit the market. That is a statement that most android advocates would agree with.
And the EU will largely just keep ratcheting up the legislation until that happens. Driving apple out is the point - walled gardens are (in the EU sense) unacceptable and the option for a walled-garden business model needs to be removed from the market.
Apple is (correctly) perceiving this and pulling out of the market, first by dropping the affected features, and I’m sure there will be a “next compliance requirement” before many years too.
I feel like this is a win for consumers - I'd much rather there remain more OS competition on mobile devices[1] but if Apple wants to pursue a business model that excludes large portions of the world from their customer base that's their decision. I don't believe there exists any maliciousness from the EU towards Apple - they do, after all, benefit greatly from corporation tax revenues from Apple and iPhones are still quite popular in the EU. I think at the end of the day there's just a difference in the social expectation of privacy and freedom between the EU and NA. Apple, being primarily steeped in NA's expectations for freedom, hasn't built an ecosystem that is compatible with the EU's higher expectations.
I don't see how you can call EU having any expectation of freedom when commenting about a law which forces a company to comply to regulation.
This actively reduces freedom, the freedom of running your business. You just don't care about it.
If you don't like walled gardens you can just not use them (I certainly never bought anything Apple for this very reason), there's no need to infringe on the freedom of everyone else who wants to use walled gardens.
The EU is in general becoming increasingly less free, thanks to barely elected bureaucrats who line up their pockets with sponsors money.
I think this is a great example of what I had mentioned as social differences of freedom between the EU and NA - in NA the freedom of businesses is often well protected up until it causes actual harm to human beings[1] - in the EU the freedom of human beings tend to be given priority of those of companies. It's important to remember that there are a lot of freedoms in this world and they often conflict in major ways. A quote that I love is "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins". Freedoms are extremely easy to guarantee if they're non-conflicting but that's rarely the case. In this case the EU is siding with the freedoms of the customers rather than the freedom of the corporation - whether that makes the society less or more free overall is a matter of opinion.
>This actively reduces freedom, the freedom of running your business. You just don't care about it.
In the same way Right to Repair, Minimum Wage, and Disciminatory hiring affects the freedom of running a business, sure. Unfortunately, rules are written in blood and this is happening because other businesses at this point abused the point of labor or customer satisfaction and needed to get dinged for it.
In this case, Blame Microsoft, I guess. Heck, even Google. we already know the result of a closed system abusing its platform and large share to make its product worse. I'm glad we're actually jumping into this before it's too late (like we usually do).
Companies don't have freedom. People do. Companies are a collection of people that have a responsibility to the people who allow them to operating by charters. In our current age, I'd say that justice in this regard isn't operating as it should, because our governments are allowing selfish individuals within companies to do illegal stuff that go against the original intent of charters. Individuals that would normally be held accountable for their actions are now being protected from being prosecuted for harms they commit while being part business.
Companies are designed and allowed, by characters, to operate within the scope of whats good for society. If it harms the public good then it needs to be reigned in. I have no illusions that companies have the same standing and rights as living beings do. They are lifeless entities meant to be subject to the will of people.
> If you don't like walled gardens you can just not use them (I certainly never bought anything Apple for this very reason), there's no need to infringe on the freedom of everyone else who wants to use walled gardens.
No-one's forcing Apple customers to go outside the walled garden. They can still source their apps from only the Apple App Store.
I suspect that from Apple's perspective, it is definitively not a significant number.
For Apple, ownership of the "trust problem" is an intrinsic part of "making good products".