Rui Carmo
Google is playing the EU game much better than Apple, but the EU still doesn’t seem to understand how privacy and security work in modern platforms. Letting people swap the onboard agent is being treated much like the ancient argument over shipping/default browsers–politically correct, bureaucratically led and technically much harder than changing a default handler.
An agent may need access to personal data and privileged APIs, and keeping a third-party agent away from things it should not access is difficult–or impossible for some features. The EU’s framing is therefore somewhat stupid, but Apple will have to deal with the same demands (and has already held features back), so Google is setting a lot of useful precedents here. Apple certainly won’t like this.