Apple, Alphabet and Meta aren’t compliant with the Digital Markets Act: EU Commissioner Breton says a “failure” is “inhuman”
“We are not convinced that the solutions by Alphabet, Apple and Meta respect their obligations for a fairer and more open digital space for European citizens and businesses,” EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said in a statement. Should the investigation show that there isn’t full compliance, there could be heavy fines for those who aren’t.
Additionally, the EU regulator is also looking into the fee structure Apple announced for distributing apps outside of the App Store, as well as whether Amazon is self-preferencing its own products on its store. Meta has been given six months to make Messenger interoperability with other messaging services, according to the Commission.
Gateskeepers have an obligation to enable uninstallation of applications and easy change of default settings according to Vestager. “Apple’s compliance model does not seem to meet the objective of this obligation.”
Apple has been criticized for how it is complying with the Digital Markets Act. It is required by the new rules that the company allow alternate app stores on the operating system, but it is doing so with a new fee structure that will deter developers from distributing apps outside of Apple’s App Store. Apple’s compliance was labeled a complete and total farce by Spotify as well as by Tim Sweeney, who called it a new instance of Malicious Compliance.
Meta’s “pay or consent model” has also been the subject of complaints from various EU watchdogs. Last year, it launched a new paid tier for Facebook and Instagram in the EU that allows users to pay €9.99 a month to use each service without ads. The subscription was designed to be a way to get user consent to collect their data if they decide not to pay, but the Commission is concerned with the “binary choice” that Meta is offering. Last week, Meta said it had offered to reduce the monthly price of ad-free access to €5.99 a month to appease regulators.
Margrethe is the EU’s competition chief said a formal investigation would focus on two elements of the smartphone maker’s business, the limits Apple puts on developers trying to link from the App Store to their own websites, and how hard.
Apple has emerged as a focal point for competition officials in both the EU and the US. The EU announcement on Monday follows a lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice last week that claimed the smartphone maker had established an iPhone monopoly that was suppressing competition and harming consumers.
The DOJ claimed that four internal Apple emails showed how the company restrict users and developers in unfair ways. In 2010, Steve Jobs and an Apple executive discussed how a new ad for Amazon.com made it sound like it was easy to switch from an Apple device to something else. The executive wrote that it wasn’t fun to watch.