Manzana She has been accused for years of having abused her position in the market and of having exercised monopolistic practices throughout its entire history. The European Union He has been investigating the iPhone manufacturer for some time on the same issue. However, European regulatory bodies have now announced that they will reduce their accusations.
Already in 2019 an investigation carried out by the New York Times revealed that in more than 700 searches for popular terms such as “books,” “music,” or “news” in the Apple app store, the app store, the company’s apps were always in first place. Some of those searches “returned up to 14 Apple apps before showing the results of their rivals”.
Since then there have been several accusations leveled against the technology giant. Some of the most notorious have been Epic Games (Fortnite), which accused the company of monopoly by not allowing external purchases to be made in the applications hosted on their devices, or the Elon Muskwhich started a public war on Twitter that was settled with a visit to its headquarters.
One of the causes that has gone the furthest has been that of Spotify, which in 2019 accused Apple before the European Commission of having abused its market position by leading users to choose Apple Music as default app to listen to music before other options such as from the App Store such as Spotify.
The European regulator, which announced last year that it intended to expand the accusations against the technology company, would now have advanced a possible reduction of the same.
As published ReutersEU antitrust regulators narrowed charges against Apple on Tuesday to focus on App Store rules that prevent developers from informing users of other purchasing options. The Commission would have withdrawn in this way the accusation related to the payments that are made within the apps.
The EU has ensured, even so, that the rules established by the iPhone manufacturer, through which application developers cannot inform users about purchase options other than those proposed by Apple, violate European regulations against unfair trading conditions.
According to the Commission, these rules are “neither necessary nor proportionate for the provision of the App Store on iPhones and iPads” and “harm users of services streaming of music on Apple mobile devices, which they may end up paying more [por ese servicio]”.
