That's incredibly demanding for a country that's been desperately trying to cling onto relevance for decades.
The company wants to do business in the UK, it has to follow UK law. UK law claims for itself the right to act globally, and has the power to arrest and fine the companies and officers of Apple that are based in the UK if they don't… but then the Pope claims supremacy over all Catholics* and gets ignored somewhat in this also, and for the same reason:
There are other governments involved, and they don't accept the UK's (/Pope's) jurisdiction exceeds their own.
And in this case, the laws of other nations seem to require Apple to violate this law, so Apple's officers have to decide between which country to risk having arrest their officers, or to leave the UK.
(I have no idea what's going to happen, because the intelligence community in every nation has reasons to want Apple to be forced to do this, so if Apple decides to agree with the UK and violate other nations' privacy laws, those privacy laws may get conveniently ignored).
The UK only has ~70 million people.
If I'm in one country and the person with whom im interacting is in another, whose geographical laws take precedence? Now imagine interacting with many many geographies at the same time.
It doesn't work and I hope one day we at least admit it to ourselves.
The uk economy is 80% services, mostly financial services and tourism, only 18% come from manufacturing
It would take a minute to set up some code to fetch the key, if they were legally forced to.
Or at the very least, it's a starting point for negotiations around how best to stop bad actors without compromising user security.
Even AirTags receive firmware updates via Bluetooth. The iPhone when off has the capabilities of an AirTag.
If Apple wanted, they could. That's all I'm saying. If AUKUS & EU say "backdoor them or no more sales" you bet your safe encryption will be no more.
Are you ready to fulfill China's and North Korea's requirements as a UK company?
Quite.
There's two reasons I left the UK: this nonsense (the whole Act, not just this specific bit) and Brexit.
But regardless, it’s exactly because it’s hard to define relevance that I was challenging the original comment, which said, without explaining what it meant by this, that the U.K. is no longer relevant.
Regardless of your feelings about this Apple issue, it just seems like an absurd thing to say about a country that’s a large economy (even if wealth is concentrated in one region), has decent cultural exports, is a nuclear power, sits on the UN Security Council, etc.
It’s exactly because it can throw its weight around with Apple, and people are treating it seriously, that it clearly is relevant. If it was some tiny nation doing it, it would just provoke amusement.
But just as an aside on your last point - I think it’s actually pretty amusing that they think they could force a backdoor on apple…