Why should they not have the right to enforce the terms of their own service? They own it, the operate it. It's theirs to do with as they wish.
Your comment might make sense of Apple were some sort of government entity, but it isn't; it was completely Facebook and Google's decision to abide by Apple's terms and conditions, something that will have been pored over by legal team upon legal team. This is not something Facebook or Google will have entered into lightly, and yet they explicitly chose to break the terms and conditions.
If I run a restaurant and one of the house rules is that you're not allowed to harass my staff and make the dining experience unpleasant for other customers, and you do that, of course I'm well within my rights to throw you out.
The difference is that Apple are controlling what software individuals can run on their own phones that they paid good money for.
The problem isn't that Apple are allowed to throw Google out of the enterprise program; the problem is that Apple users aren't allowed to install Google's apps without Apple's permission.
It's fair enough to say that Google can't complain because they knew the terms of the enterprise agreement. But I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple phone purchasers are clearly told when they buy a phone that Apple can disable their employer's internal apps.
> The difference is that Apple are controlling what software individuals can run on their own phones that they paid good money for.
Maybe, except that the enterprise app distribution system is a service provided by Apple. It has associated terms and conditions.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't think it's the argument to be making right now; if the topic were jailbreaking, sure. As it is, it's about abusing a service. The enterprise app distribution system is not sideloading in the same sense as it is on Android; it is a service for a specific purpose.
> But I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple phone purchasers are clearly told when they buy a phone that Apple can disable their employer's internal apps
For the individual employees, no, they probably don't know this. However, they have no real need to know; this is an implementation detail on the employer's end.
The employers 100% know about this, or else they wouldn't agree to the terms and conditions of the enterprise app distribution system. Legal teams will have pored over this. Nobody is ignorant of the implications of their actions; it just happened to be that two high-profile companies made the mistake of thinking they were immune to punishment.
But no, any company involved in the enterprise app distribution system knows 100% what getting that certificate revoked means. Especially a tech company!
> Why should they not have the right to enforce the terms of their own service? They own it, the operate it. It's theirs to do with as they wish.
Because they became too big. It's the right of e.g. the EU to allow them to operate. Or better said, the law could be changed to disallow operation if certainy conditions are not met. Apple then has the choice to either adapt or leave the EU market.
You're talking like the EU has one set of rules for companies from its members and another for others, but that isn't the case. The EU treats all monopolies equally; Apple isn't close to a monopoly.
Of the actors involved here, Google is the one that the EU is most concerned about.
Apple is only acting on their own turf, their services. Their reach is not far spread outside of the iOS landscape, heavily dwarfed by Google's Android at something like 85% share.
There are not only monopoly rules. It seems plausible to me that there could be a rule that mobile phone/computer ecosystems above a certain threshold must grant access to the platform (under reasonable conditions).
That would be the EU going beyond their reach, invading into private business practices, something more akin to the Soviet Union than the EU. Apart from that, "size" means nothing and is completely arbitrary; the EU has only ever really chased monopolies and companies that flout EU regulations and taxation. Let's stop injecting our own ideologies into what we'd like some state or other to do; we should never want any kind of government to regulate that heavily.
Your comment might make sense of Apple were some sort of government entity, but it isn't; it was completely Facebook and Google's decision to abide by Apple's terms and conditions, something that will have been pored over by legal team upon legal team. This is not something Facebook or Google will have entered into lightly, and yet they explicitly chose to break the terms and conditions.
If I run a restaurant and one of the house rules is that you're not allowed to harass my staff and make the dining experience unpleasant for other customers, and you do that, of course I'm well within my rights to throw you out.