[ad_1]
The EU will launch an official antitrust investigation on Apple in the coming weeks after Spotify has accused the iPhone maker of "tipping the scales of the ground to disadvantage its competitors".
The investigation comes as the battle for the future of the music industry intensifies. Spotify, which reached 100 million subscribers last month, is the market leader in streaming music, but faces growing competition from major technology players, Apple and Amazon. .
In March, the streaming music service filed a formal EU complaint alleging that Apple had behaved illegally and abused its dominance of the App Store to promote its own Apple Music service.
Spotify's complaint relates to Apple's policy of charging digital content providers a 30% fee for the use of its payment system for subscriptions sold on its App Store. The strategy applies to Spotify and other music subscription services, but not to apps, such as Uber.
After examining the complaint and examining customers, competitors and other market players, the EU Competition Commission decided to launch a formal antitrust investigation into Apple's behavior, according to three people close to the company. investigation.
Apple and Spotify both declined to comment.
EU supervisory authorities may require companies to change their business practices that they deem illegal and may impose fines of up to 10% of turnover. global of a company. Surveys do not have a deadline and can take years to resolve. However, companies can speed up the process and avoid fines by proposing to solve problems with binding promises of behavior change.
In an interview in March after the complaint, Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, told the Financial Times that the company's long fight against Apple had become "untenable". He warned that the music streaming service would raise prices if Apple continued to charge 30%.
Deezer, a competing streaming music service, and BEUC, a European consumer group, echoed Spotify's concerns.
Thomas Vinje, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, who worked on Spotify's complaint, said other groups had "similar concerns" but were "too scared to face Apple".
Apple responded to the complaint by accusing Spotify of "deceptive rhetoric".
"After using the App Store for years to grow their business dramatically, Spotify wants to retain all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem, including the substantial revenues that it has. they pull customers from the App Store, without making any contribution to this market. company said in a press release at the time.
"Spotify is free to create and compete for our products and platforms, and we hope they will."
European regulators have frequently looked at Apple in recent years.
In 2017, Margrethe Vestager, EU Commissioner for Competition, forced the technology group to pay 13 billion euros in tax arrears, after its tax deal was taken over by l & # 39; Ireland. The company and the Irish government have appealed this decision to the European Court, which is expected to rule later this year.
Ms. Vestager also closely examined the purchase of Apple's Shazam music identification application in 2018, but ultimately approved the $ 400 million contract.
Apple is not the only technology group in Brussels. Google has paid a record 8 billion euros in penalties for abusing its market power in three separate cases. Microsoft also struggled with the EU supervisory authorities in the 2000s and paid about 2 billion euros in fines.
Although these cases gave rise to accusations of anti-American bias, investigations often focused on complaints from US rivals. EU regulators have also sued many non-US giants, such as the Russian gas supplier Gazprom, the diamond producer DeBeers and the nuclear divisions of the French company Areva and its German rival.
Recently, US politicians and activists have called for more regulation – or even dissolution – of tech giants like Google and Facebook. They say the US authorities have enforced stronger anti-trust rules than over-zealous Europeans.
[ad_2]
Source link