ROMA (ITALPRESS) – The Authority of Competition and Market has introduced to Apple companies a penalty of 98,635,416,67 euros for abuse of a dominant position.
Apple has infringed Article 102 of the TFUE regarding the supply market to developers of platforms for online distribution of apps for iOS operating system users. In this market, Apple is in a position of absolute dominance through its App Store. At the end of a complex investigation, also conducted in coordination with the European Commission, with other national competition authorities and with the Personal Data Protection Authority, the AGCM has ascertained the restrictiveness – in the competitive profile – of the App Tracking Transparency (“ATT”), that is, of the privacy rules imposed by Apple, starting from April 2021, in the context of its iOS mobile operating system, to third party developers.
In particular, third-party developers are obliged to acquire a specific consent for the collection and connection of data for advertising purposes through a screen set by Apple, the so-called ATT prompt which, however, is not sufficient to meet the requirements provided by the privacy legislation, thus forcing developers to duplicate the consent request for the same purpose.
The Antitrust has ascertained that the conditions of the ATT policy are unilaterally imposed, are the interests of Apple’s business partners and are not proportionate to reach the privacy goal, as well as besieged by the company.
In fact, since the user data is a fundamental element on which the ability to make personalised online advertising is based, the inevitable duplication of the requests for consent induced by the implementation of the ATT policy – which restricts the possibility of collecting, linking and using such data – causes a prejudice to the activity of the developers, which base their business model on the sale of advertising spaces, and also to that of intermediary advertisers and advertising platforms.
This duplication produces an absence of proportionality of the ATT policy rules, considering that Apple should have ensured the same level of user privacy by providing the possibility, for developers, to obtain consent to profiling in a single solution.
-Photo IPA Agency-
(ITALPRESS).
