Yahoo Autos EU antitrust regulators target Apple's 'anti-steering' developer restrictions, but drop in-app purchases case
The European Commission (EC) has confirmed a previously issued preliminary view that Apple's so-called "anti-steering" practices, which prevent developers from informing users about alternative payment options, constitutes unfair trading practices.
However, in a refined Statement of Objections sent to Apple and published for the public today, the EC also said that it's dropping an additional anti-trust charge against the tech giant around the issue of how Apple imposes its own in-app purchase (IAP) payment technology on music-streaming service providers. It wrote:
Today's Statement of Objections clarifies that the Commission does no longer take a position as to the legality of the IAP obligation for the purposes of this antitrust investigation but rather focuses on the contractual restrictions that Apple imposed on app developers which prevent them from informing iPhone and iPad users of alternative music subscription options at lower prices outside of the app and to effectively choose those.
The story so far
The saga dates back nearly four years, when Spotify filed a complaint against Apple with the European Commission over alleged restrictive rules and what it referred to as an "Apple tax" -- a fee that developers must pay Apple where in-app payments or subscriptions are involved.
The crux of the issue is that Spotify has to pay Apple a percentage of any subscriptions that it secures through Apple's App Store, a fee that Spotify then has to pass on to its own customers -- this effectively means that a Spotify subscription is more expensive when a consumer signs up through an iPhone or iPad than it is through Spotify's own website. Moreover, given that Apple offers a competing service -- Apple Music -- Spotify argued that this puts Apple at an advantage, given that it can offer its own music-streaming service at a cheaper price.
On top of that, Spotify also took issue with the way that Apple prevents developers from informing consumers of alternative payment methods. For example, Spotify is prohibited from saying in its App Store description notes or in the app itself that users can sign up for a monthly subscription for $3 cheaper through Spotify.com.
And it's this second contention that the EC is now focusing squarely on.
