Ok that makes sense, I figured it had to be something like that. They couldn’t possibly think they could legislate a single world market. As nice as that may be.
I guess that leaves me with the big question: why are there multiple markets. Why didn’t Apple just set up an EU one from the start? The shared market has been around longer than Apple has been selling digital stuff.
Maybe it just started out as a way to handle the different languages and sort of evolved to where it is today even though since it’s now more than just music it doesn’t make as much sense?
App Store was/is built on top of the iTunes Store infrastructure which was launched only 10 years after the EU single market was created. And it was designed to support music purchases where licensing by country is the standard.
And these purchases are tied to your credit card which even to this day is pinned to a particular country. This is how Apple largely implements geo-blocking.
I knew it was built on the iTunes Store because I’ve heard stories over the years from developers on podcasts about how sort of creaky it is. It always sounded like they were totally unprepared for the app explosion and not ready to handle that kind of volume in something that was more complicated than a simple song file that never changed.
But shouldn’t music licensing in the EU not have been by country at that point?
I guess that leaves me with the big question: why are there multiple markets. Why didn’t Apple just set up an EU one from the start? The shared market has been around longer than Apple has been selling digital stuff.
Maybe it just started out as a way to handle the different languages and sort of evolved to where it is today even though since it’s now more than just music it doesn’t make as much sense?