investigation into the abuse of a dominant position in the app market – Corriere.it

Apple is once again under the scrutiny of the Antitrust for the online distribution of apps for users of the iOS operating system. The Competition and Market Authority (Agcm) has launched an investigation against the companies Apple Inc., Apple Distribution International Ltd, Apple Italia srl ​​to ascertain the existence of an alleged abuse of a dominant position in the platform market. According to the Agcm, starting from April 2021, the Cupertino giant has adopted a privacy policy, for third-party app developers only, more restrictive than the one it applies to itself. “The different treatment is mainly based on the characteristics of the prompt that appears to users to acquire consent to the tracking of their navigation data on the web and on the tools adopted to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns”, reads the note from the authority.

“Apple – continues the note – only requires competitors to use a prompt for requesting consent in a position of greater prominence than that of the option to deny consent and uses a dissuasive linguistic formulation of tracking”. Furthermore, according to the Antitrust, developers and third-party advertisers would also be disadvantaged in terms of quality and detail of the data made available by Apple and relating to the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on their applications. The programming interface they can access, SkadNetwork, appears less effective than Apple Ads Attribution, the tool that Apple adopts for itself, explains the Agcm.

This conduct, observes the Antitrust, may cause a drop in the advertising revenues of third-party advertisers, to the advantage of its commercial division, reduce entry and/or prevent the permanence of competitors in the app development and distribution market, their own apps and, consequently, the Apple iOS operating system. According to the Antitrust, the alleged reduction of competition in the relevant markets and the consequent strengthening of Apple’s digital ecosystem could reduce the incentives to develop innovative apps and hinder the transition of users towards competing digital ecosystems.