authority dutch of competition condemned Apple’s practices vis-à-vis dating applications, in December 2021. While waiting to change its rules, Apple must pay 5 million euros per week in the Netherlands. She has already reached the maximum fine.
How to enforce a rule to a company more powerful than the authority that condemns it? This puzzle is that of the Netherlands, in difficulty since December 24, 2021. On this date, its anticompetitive authority asked Apple to update its App Store to allow users of dating applications to use solutions alternative payment methods, under penalty of having to pay a weekly fine of 5 million euros. The rest was quite predictable: ten weeks later, Apple has already paid a fine of 50 million euros, or 0.04% of its turnover in the first quarter of 2022.
50 million that the Netherlands did not see coming
By condemning Apple in December, the Netherlands probably expected to see Apple quickly accept its new rules. The proof, their condemnation imagined a weekly payment of 5 million euros, within the limit of 50 million euros. In other words, Apple has already arrived at the maximum penalty, without having made the slightest change.
In a press release dated March 28, 2022, the ACM (Authority for Consumers and Markets) said it was preparing for possible new measures. If she remains confident in the goodwill of Apple, she indicates: “If the ACM finds that Apple does not meet the requirements, it may issue another order with penalties (possibly higher penalties this time) to induce Apple to comply with the ‘order. “.
The Netherlands are not the first to be victims of the too good financial health of GAFAM. This is also why the DMA, future European regulation for digital companies, provides for fines of up to 20% of global turnover. In the case of Apple, we would therefore go from 5 million euros to… 22.4 billion euros at most. We imagine that the pressure would be immediately greater.
Apple would soon make efforts
Also according to the ACM, Apple would not completely ignore its requests. If we prefer to be cautious given the number of times the Dutch authority has repeated itself, it indicates that Apple has reviewed its proposal and is preparing to make the requested changes. We imagine that the Netherlands is referring to the changes announced in August 2021, which will allow certain applications to accept subscriptions from a website, and not from the App Store.
For now, they still haven’t seen the light of day, but a future version of iOS could fix the problem. Once these changes are in place, the Dutch authority will examine them and may, possibly, condemn Apple a second time and restart weekly payments.