Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption

Most of the signal landed on one blunt point: this is the law doing exactly what it was meant to do. Apple is free not to launch. The EU is free not to grant exemptions to a company the DMA was largely written to constrain. A lot of commenters read the privacy argument as mostly strategic. The DMA fight is about competition, not GDPR-style privacy compliance, and Apple’s real problem is that Siri gets privileged access to personal context, app actions, and system data that competitors do not. If Apple wants that moat, Europe is the one market telling it no. The more technical pushback was that compliance work at this scale is genuinely hard and slow. Engineers with large-company experience said this kind of requirement can force redesigns across identity, permissions, audit trails, regional gating, and backend architecture. That did not buy Apple much sympathy because the DMA is not new. Apple had years of warning and chose an architecture that worked for Apple-first access before proving it could support third parties on equal terms. That made many people see the exemption request as a deliberate product and lobbying bet, not an engineering surprise. A narrower but serious defense of Apple said the tension is real even if the PR framing is self-serving. Siri AI’s value comes from unusually broad access to device context. Giving that same reach to third-party assistants could create a giant new data extraction surface, especially if providers less privacy-conscious than Apple get in. That concern got some traction, but it was undercut by a simpler rebuttal: if Apple can safely grant itself those powers, it can build a permissions and mediation model for others too. The claim that this is impossible sounded weak, especially after commenters pointed to Apple’s own mention of a proposed intermediary called Trusted System Agent. A second thread looked past Apple and at EU governance. Some readers defended the DMA’s outcome-based style as normal European lawmaking aimed at stopping loophole games. Others said this vagueness creates regulatory uncertainty and makes companies wait for post hoc interpretation rather than build to a crisp checklist. Still, even many critics of the DMA agreed that asking for a one-off exemption for Apple was a nonstarter. The thread ended in a pragmatic place: Europe is choosing competition and user choice over Apple’s preferred integration model, and Apple is choosing delay over giving up that advantage.