The EU agrees with Spotify and believes Apple has “abused its dominant power”

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The European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, said on Friday that Apple has monopolized the distribution of music apps on the company’s products.

The commission claims that the company has “abused its dominant power” by taking a large commission of third-party app sales on the App Store.

The EU has been investigating Apple and the App Store for almost a year, after music streaming platform, Spotify, had a lot of negative things to say about Apple’s treatment of the app on the App Store. In order to be able to sell subscriptions on the App Store, Spotify is required to pay a 30% commission to Apple for every subscription sold.

Our preliminary conclusion: @Apple is in breach of EU competition law. @AppleMusic compete with other music streaming services. But @Apple charges high commission fees on rivals in the App store & forbids them to inform of alternative subscription options. Consumers losing out.

— Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) April 30, 2021

According to CNBC, the European Commission weighed in on this issue on Friday. During a press conference, head of competition policy in the EU, Margrethe Vestager, said “Our preliminary finding is that Apple exercises considerable market power in the distribution of music streaming apps to owners of Apple devices. On that market, Apple has a monopoly.”

While the European Commission certainly thinks the company is in the wrong here, the iPhone innovators have taken a different stance, claiming that the EU is against fair competition. ln response to the commission’s claims, Apple said this:

“Spotify has become the largest music subscription service in the world, and we’re proud of the role we played in that. Once again, they want all the benefits of the App Store but don’t think they should have to pay anything for that.”

This finding is called a statement of objections, which is just a part of the process of an antitrust investigation. From here, Apple will have to make a formal response, and then the probe will continue. For now, it looks like changes may soon come to the App Store.

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