The European Commission has opened investigations into Apple, Alphabet and Meta for potential breaches of the new Digital Markets Act which prevents anti-competitive business practices.
The European Commission said the investigation would focus on “Alphabet’s rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search, Apple’s rules on steering in the App Store and the choice screen for Safari, and Meta’s ‘pay or consent model.”
The Commission suspects that the measures put in place by these gatekeepers fall short of effective compliance of their obligations under the DMA.
The investigations are the first major test of Europe’s Digital Markets Act, targeting Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, TikTok parent ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft who were determined to be “gatekeepers” of the Internet.
If the companies are found to have breached the Digital Markets Act, EU regulators can impose fines of up to 10% of their total worldwide turnover and can be increased to 20% for repeated infringement.
The European Commission said it is also investigating whether Amazon is preferencing its own products in its online store, and examining whether Apple’s new fee structure and other terms and conditions for alternative app stores and distribution of apps from the web are “defeating the purpose” of the law.
The European Commission has also ordered Alphabet, Apple and Amazon to retain documents to monitor the effective implementation and compliance with their obligations.
They can also order changes, such as obliging a gatekeeper to sell a business or parts of it, or banning the gatekeeper from acquisitions of other services related to the systemic non-compliance in the “case of systemic infringements”.
The investigation into Apple comes just after last week’s antitrust lawsuit filed by the US Justice Department, which alleges the company has taken illegal steps to ensure the dominance of its iPhone.
The EU’s antitrust officials have opened proceedings against Alphabet, to determine whether Google is self-preferencing its own services, like Google Shopping and Google Flights, in search results.
Google and Apple are being examined on EU rule compliance, which requiring them to allow third-party developers to “steer” customers to cheaper product offers outside their app stores.
Apple is also being investigated regarding their measures to comply with obligations to enable end users to easily uninstall any software applications on iOS, and easily change default settings for their preferred search engine.
Meta is being probed on its ad-free subscription plans for Facebook and Instagram users, launched in Europe last year, since it gives users a choice whether their data can be collected and used for targeted ads while users who consent to be tracked get a free service which is funded by advertising revenues.