Apple’s App Store and the iOS operating system are rightly classified as online “gatekeepers,” an EU court ruled on Wednesday, dealing a legal setback to the US-based technology giant which had sought to free itself from ensuing antitrust obligations.<\/p>\n
Under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, digital platforms can be designated as gatekeepers if they represent an important gateway for consumers to access services.<\/p>\n
Companies designated as gatekeepers by the European Commission are subject to special obligations to ensure fair competition in digital markets.<\/p>\n
The law grew out of concerns that some large platform operators had become so powerful that they could entrench their market position.<\/p>\n
Apple was listed as a gatekeeper for its App Store, iOS and Safari services by the commission in September 2023. Other tech giants on the list include Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta.<\/p>\n
Some of the companies, including Apple, took legal action against the classification.<\/p>\n
But the commission was right to classify the Apple services as gatekeepers under the DMA, the General Court ruled on Wednesday. The decision can still be appealed before the European Court of Justice, the bloc’s top arbiter.<\/p>\n
The Luxembourg court confirmed the commission’s assessment that the variants of the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac and Apple TV constitute one and the same core platform service. They had the same purpose, that of bringing together software developers and end users, the court said.<\/p>\n
Apple had argued that the stores should have been considered individually, in which case only the iOS App Store would have met the required thresholds for a gatekeeper designation.<\/p>\n
Apple had also challenged the classification of iMessage as a number-independent interpersonal communications service – that is, a service in which communication is not based on a telephone number from the public telephone network but on usernames or accounts, for example.<\/p>\n
The court declared the actions on this point inadmissible. This classification alone did not produce binding legal effects that would alter Apple’s legal position, it said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Apple’s App Store and the iOS operating system are rightly classified as online “gatekeepers,” an EU court ruled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2385],"tags":[8576,46996,46976,8874,256,25378,666,1608],"class_list":["post-89239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-european-commission","tag-apple","tag-apple-store","tag-apple-watch","tag-digital-markets","tag-european-commission","tag-gatekeeper","tag-the-european-commission","tag-the-european-union"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}