Foo Yun Chee, reporting for Reuters:

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager on Tuesday warned Apple and Meta on their new fees for their services, saying that this may hinder users from enjoying the benefits of the Digital Markets Act which aims to give them more choices...

Vestager said the new fees have attracted her attention...

“There are things that we take a keen interest in, for instance, if the new Apple fee structure will de facto not make it in any way attractive to use the benefits of the DMA. That kind of thing is what we will be investigating,” she told Reuters in an interview.

Being “attractive” is not a requirement of the DMA. The DMA requires openness — it doesn’t actually care about the feelings of whoever the beneficiaries of the law are supposed to be. Vestager, once again, is bending the rules of her own law to make it do things it doesn’t do. The Core Technology Fee might make the new DMA-mandated contract less “attractive,” but that was never the point of the DMA. There is not a single line in the DMA that tells so-called “gatekeepers” that their new rules need to be morally correct and attractive. The new, alternate rules gatekeepers impose on developers just need to fit within the poorly written bounds of the DMA.

The European Parliament and European Commission are absolutely terrible at writing laws. That might sound hypocritical coming from an American, knowing Congress’ inability to do anything correctly, but no legislature in our current global political climate is particularly good at legislation. The European Union wrote a terrible, broad, non-binding, free-for-all, good-for-nothing law and is now trying to enforce it after lobbying attempts from successful companies.

At the end of the day, the DMA was written to be anti-Apple. There has not been a company that has suffered more under this ridiculous law than Apple because it was written to attack Apple and no other company. By contrast, Vestager didn’t make half as much of a fuss about Google’s anti-steering provisions or Meta’s insidious advertisement tracking technologies. Just more whininess from the European Union to discourage U.S. companies from doing business in Europe.