The German antitrust has announced that in the next five years will pay more attention to Apple’s moves. A sort of special surveillance to which the Bundeskartellamt will subject Apple to prevent it from venturing into practices contrary to German competition law. The fulcrum of the story is what we are used to, Apple is more or less explicitly accused of exercising a strong control over customers and competitors.
In the light of the way in which the ecosystem is structured, and the reference is in particular to iOS, which does not allow who knows what leeway for customers, in light of the absolute control over the stores and the App Store and the large resources, including economic ones which it has, the antitrust has decided to give Apple “special” attention for five years. The decision of the Bundeskartellamt starts from afar, the first signs that sooner or later something would move date back to the summer of 2021, when the authority undertook the task of examining the ecosystem of Apple products and services to establish whether, in managing them violated one or more competition laws.
Apple holds an economic position of power in all markets, which gives it a leeway that is not sufficiently controlled by the competition – writes the president of the Bundeskartellamt Andreas Mundt. Based on its mobile devices such as the iPhone, Apple controls a large digital ecosystem that is of great importance for competition not only in Germany, but throughout Europe and the world. Through its systems and markets, therefore iOS and the App Store, Apple holds a key position for access to the Apple ecosystem and customers. This move allows us to take action and effectively ban anti-competitive practices.
For some years now, the Bundeskartellamt has been evaluating whether app developers are penalized or not by whether Apple pre-installs its own apps on devicesand is analyzing the anti-tracking system after receiving several inputs from some advertising companies, who opposed the solution adopted since iOS 14.5 by virtue of which the user must explicitly authorize the collection of data for advertising purposes, a measure that would have had a huge impact on revenue. At the moment the authority has not decided whether to take action against Apple.
