The iPhone manufacturer is seeking all possible means to escape the new European rules forcing opening to competition. There is no question for the manufacturer to loosen the screw around the App Store.
This was to be expected. The entry into force of the DMA and the DSA, the two European texts formalizing new legal rules for large digital players, is not well viewed by Apple. The company has been trying for months now to avoid the opening to competition pushed by Brussels. Before the Union Court, the brand finally explains itself.
Of the ” significant factual errors » according to Apple
According to the manufacturer, the European Commission committed “significant factual errors, considering that the brand’s five App Stores constitute a single platform», Reveals Reuters. For the company, the application stores on iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac constitute distinct services and must therefore be analyzed by Brussels independently of each other.
The tactic Apple employs here is simple. By trying to convince the courts that its different stores have nothing to do with each other, the company wants to bring them below the critical threshold of users above which a platform is forced to offer methods of alternative software distribution.
For Apple, the outcome of this trial is of paramount importance. By maintaining the exclusivity of software distribution on its platforms, the company retains the financial windfall that accompanies it since it takes 30% of the amount of each transaction carried out on its services. According to the brand, it is also a question of security since opening its App Store to competition “would also allow bad actors to bypass our arsenal of privacy protection measures», noted Tim Cook in 2022.
The fate of iMessage in question
In the same argument, Apple is also trying to convince the second highest European court that iMessage is not a “non-numbering based interpersonal communication service» important enough to have to comply with the interoperability rules proposed by the DMA. Here again, it is a question for Apple of maintaining an ecosystem advantage that Tim Cook has established as a real selling point for the iPhone.
A situation which is precisely denounced by the DMA which judges that this type of closed services “further exacerbates entry barriers for other providers of such services and increases switching costs for end users“. We’ll have to wait to see what the EU Court thinks, but it could be that Apple is at least evading EU rules regarding iMessage, as the service is not that popular in Europe .
Source : Reuters
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