Bad news for the Competition Authority. Two years after imposing a record fine of 1.1 billion euros on Apple, it has just been partially disavowed by the Paris Court of Appeal, which decided to reduce the penalty to 371.6 million. euros, i.e. three times less, yields Reuters. However, this is not enough for the Cupertino company, which has announced that it is appealing in cassation to completely cancel this fine.
This had been imposed by the Competition Authority, which had found in March 2020 that Apple was guilty of unlawful agreement with distributors and abuse of economic dependence. In other words, the regulator considered that the Californian company had distorted competition by favoring its own shops and a few wholesalers, which harmed de facto to other authorized dealers.
After the Paris Court of Appeal, the Court of Cassation expected at the turn
According to the Competition Authority, the charges, which allowed Apple to keep control of the selling prices of its products, were spread over a period of eight years, between 2005 and 2013. But the Court of he Paris appeal considered that this period was only four years, between 2009 and 2013. In addition, the court only accepted two of the three initial grievances and lowered the increase coefficient retained in 2020 to set the amount of the fine. Consequently, the penalty was greatly reduced on appeal.
From now on, the case should be played before the Court of Cassation, which could also be seized by the Competition Authority. The verdict of the supreme court of the judiciary will be particularly scrutinized, while other GAFAM, in particular Amazon and Google, are the subject of several investigations for various abuses of dominant position which have prevented the development of competition. If the fine imposed on Apple is purely and simply canceled, the blow will be particularly hard to collect for the French regulator.