Apple wants to get rid of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the new European regulation which wants to strengthen control over digital giants.
At the end of October, the EU gave more details on its plans to regulate digital markets (DMA), providing, among other things, a list of entities affected by this new legislation. The Court of Justice of the European Union has now announced that Apple, directly targeted by the texts, was going to take legal action to try to escape the famous DMA.
The App Store at the heart of the debates?
Neither Apple nor the EU Court of Justice have yet commented further on this upcoming legal action. So we don’t officially know what Apple’s grounds for protest are, but Bloomberg reported a few days ago that the American company was going to challenge the inclusion of the App Store in the list of platforms subject to the DMA. This could indeed open the door to the arrival of third-party application stores on iOS.
As a reminder, the EU has identified 22 “access controllers”, digital services with a large volume of users, which are therefore targeted by the DMA. These 22 platforms essentially belong to six major technology groups: Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook) and ByteDance (TikTok).
The objective of the DMA is in particular to facilitate interactions between competing services. Concretely, this involves, for example, setting up a system allowing different messaging applications to work with each other. The EU also insists on the practice of pre-installed applications on devices.
Meta and TikTok also contest
Therefore, the EU wants to protect consumers from acquisitions, concentrations and abuse of dominant position, commonplace in the industry, which lead irremediably to a deterioration of conditions for users.
Apple is not the first to attack this text. Meta has already filed appeals against the inclusion of the Messenger application and its Facebook Marketplace service on the list of “access controllers” defined by the EU.
TikTok also protested against the decision to place it under the DMA. It considers itself an adversary in the market, which is precisely disrupting the large, dominant and already established companies.
Source : Reuters
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