En Great Britain, as in all of Northern Europe, the walled garden (walled garden in English) is an institution. It protects from animals, intruders and especially from the cold squalls that sweep across Scotland. In the digital world, walled gardens have also flourished to protect against bad winds. The most famous is that of Apple. It is easy to visit, but getting out is more difficult, as the brand’s different devices are linked together by in-house software that is little or not used on devices that are not marked with the famous apple.
Of course, visitors, who want to offer their services to users of all these homemade objects, starting with the iPhone, are admitted, but you have to pay the high price and not try to set up shop nearby. This is particularly the case for the millions of developers who offer their software on the brand’s application store, the App Store.
Spotify, the world leader in online music, must thus pay like the others nearly 30% of the income it generates thanks to this store to Apple. In addition, the Apple firm would have knowingly blocked its initiatives to encourage its customers to install its application without going through the App Store. In response, Spotify filed a complaint with the European Commission in 2019. It opened an investigation in 2020 and, according to Financial Times, decided to impose a fine of almost 500 million dollars (around 463.7 million euros) on Apple. News that could be announced in early March.
Disciplining the oligopoly
Brussels is determined to break down the walls of the gardens of the Internet giants, which it rightly calls the “gate keepers” (gatekeepers), in other words, those whose platforms are so powerful that they can impose their conditions on service providers. Its new legislation on digital markets (Digital Markets Act) gives it the tools to limit the power of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
She is not the only one trying to discipline this oligopoly. In California, Apple lost in court against the video game publisher Epic, which, like Spotify, intends to offer iPhone users another option in the App Store. He would even like to create his own application store in Apple phones. The Supreme Court ended this legal procedure in January.
All this is particularly unfortunate for the company created by Steve Jobs, because it touches on its historical strategic vision and its current constraints. Since its origins, the firm has closely combined software and computers, services and hardware to better optimize their operation. In addition, services, which represent $85 billion in annual revenue, are its main source of growth, given the saturation of the smartphone market. Having the most beautiful garden in the world creates jealousies, but also duties.