Welcome to TOS Weekly!

After the publication of the Summer 2026 issue of TOS, the team is once again hard at work on new articles. Among those published with the Summer issue was Anna Shnaidman’s critical analysis of the oft-celebrated “epic theatre” play Mother Courage and Her Children. Alongside that, this week we mark the birthday of the little-known and vastly under-appreciated hero of liberty and reason Auberon Herbert, the similarly overlooked atlases of abolition, and the anniversary of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

What’s New?

This Week’s Anniversaries

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Contrary to Donald Trump’s critics calling to “depoliticize” antitrust enforcement, arbitrary antitrust laws have never been objectively enforced

The post Trump Didn’t Corrupt Antitrust: Arbitrary Enforcement Is Nothing New appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.

 

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money — and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose — because it contains all the others — the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity — to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favour. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created."

~ Ayn Rand from her 1953 essay '“The Meaning of Money” collected in her book For the New Intellectual

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"The truth is that across all the pages of history there have been two fundamental antagonists who have been variously venerated and eviscerated: the trader, and the warrior -- the former the bringer of peace, the latter the bringer of violence. The man of peace, and the man of war. The man who relies on voluntary exchange to mutual advantage, and the man who loots and plunders. The man who produces value, and the man who destroys it. The bringer of peace and prosperity, and all the benighted horsemen of the apocalypse."

=> The three horsemen of non-apocalypse - NOT PC, 2010

The Washington Post editorial board yesterday (News+ link), “Why Europe Won’t Have the New Siri”:

Brussels insists the decision is “Apple’s and Apple’s only” and that nothing in its flagship Digital Markets Act forbids the launch. That’s technically true and wholly beside the point.

The law requires that the moment Siri AI ships in Europe, any rival AI agent must get the same sweeping access to a user’s messages, files and chat history. Apple proposed putting in a software security layer to make that safe and offered a phased rollout to build it. According to Apple, the European Commission rejected the proposal.

The DMA was supposed to open markets. But its legal logic was born in the era of browsers, app stores and messaging apps. These components can be swapped like batteries.

The DMA effectively demands everything to be swappable/interchangeable. So while the European Commission is correct that the DMA does not forbid Apple from launching a version of Siri AI, it clearly forbids Apple from launching the version of Siri AI they actually built.

Behind all this lies the dream that Europe could be a “regulatory superpower.” It wanted to create a market too big to skip that would, by virtue of its heft, end up exporting its rules to the rest of the world. That hasn’t worked out.

When adapting a product for Europe costs more than European market access is worth, companies no longer comply. They simply leave out the feature.

That’s the folly of the DMA, or at least the maximal interpretation of the DMA that the European Commission is pursuing. It only makes sense under the assumption that the EU is too big a market to ignore, and the EU’s market might is such that systems will be designed to meet their compliance standards, regardless of whether the makers of these systems support the regulations or not. (And in the case of Apple with iOS and Google with Android, the two companies are in lockstep in their opposition to the EU’s regulations on system-level AI interoperability.)

First, the EU is big but it isn’t that big. The best estimate I’ve seen is that the EU accounts for about 7% of Apple’s worldwide revenue. Plus, because of the DMA, the cost of doing business in the EU is now significantly higher for Apple and Google, because they need to engineer DMA-compliant versions of various features and systems. Unless, that is, they stop bringing (a long and ever-growing list of) new features to the EU.

Which brings me to my second point. What exactly is the motivation for Apple and Google to engineer entirely separate systems for the EU to bring new features into compliance with the Commission’s broad interpretation of the DMA? Because if Apple doesn’t engineer a DMA-compliant version of Siri AI, iOS users in the EU will ... switch to Android, whose system-level AI was deemed noncompliant by the Commission a few months ago?

This doesn’t directly hurt Apple. It doesn’t force Apple to design, engineer, and ship a compliant EU-exclusive version of Siri AI that supports plug-and-play LLM back ends. It only hurts iPhone users who live in the EU, who are stuck with the old dumb version of Siri for the foreseeable future. The European Commission is either stupid or insane.

Yours truly, in September 2024, expressing skepticism that “European iPhones are more fun now”:

Meanwhile no one in the EU will get Apple Intelligence or iPhone Mirroring, both of which features are very useful, and, dare I say, quite fun. Should we judge how much fun each side of the continental divide is having by how much fun they theoretically could be having, or by how much fun they are having?

As it stands, the fun side is not the EU. But hope springs eternal.

Here we are two years later and I think the answer is more clear than ever which side of the continental divide is more fun. It’s not the EU. EU users still don’t have iPhone Mirroring and until and unless the European Commission changes its interpretation of the DMA, they likely never will. It’s a great feature.

Apple Intelligence, as we knew it until last week, eventually came to the EU, about six months after it shipped for the rest of us. One can reasonably argue that EU iPhone and iPad users didn’t miss much during those six months. And that there hasn’t been that much to enjoy since Apple Intelligence debuted in the EU in iOS 18.4. That changed last week with the introduction of the first beta release of iOS 27. Siri AI is really good, truly useful, and genuinely fun. And it is not on pace to come to the EU six months after iOS 27 ships this fall. It is currently on pace to come to the EU never.

George Will reports with relief that "the separation of powers might actually be working" regarding a bipartisan proposal to make amends for a ruling many had hoped for, but that the Supreme Court did not think it could make.

Will's headline and focus are on a "judicial ruling prompt[ing] two senators to pursue legislation to curtail executive branch mischief," but the measure will indeed be good news for other reasons should it pass and be signed into law.

The problem this legislation seeks to fix is that the plainly wrong pandemic-era jawboning of social media platforms was not unambiguously illegal in part because the threats were delivered in secret:

[The bill w]ould require government to make public certain kinds of communications with social media companies, artificial intelligence companies and broadcasters. And would establish that plaintiffs must prove only that government attempted censorship, not that its pressure by itself succeeded. And would provide for money damages, instead of mere injunctions, for plaintiffs when an offending official left office while a case wended its way through courts.

So, crude and sneaky overreaching by the executive was followed by the Supreme Court's austere (and reasonable) refusal to overreach by ignoring principles of standing. This has prompted two lawmakers to respond. If Congress makes that response a law, there will have been a minuet of actions and reactions driven by each branch's prerogatives, responsibilities and incentives. The separation of powers will have functioned as intended.

As I greet the good news regarding freedom of speech, I agree with Will that our government working properly is indeed also newsworthy.

Let's hope -- and work for the day -- that checks and balances working their magic becomes un-newsworthy again.

-- CAV