EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager wants to examine whether Apple can be attributed a dominant position. The occasion is a complaint of the music streaming service Spotify. "We need to examine the role of Apple and Apple's App Store in this regard," Vestager told the "Tagesspiegel".
Among other things, Spotify denounced that for subscription subscriptions on the iPhone - as well as other in-app purchases on the platform - usually has to give 70 percent of the proceeds to Apple. Apple has an advantage in pricing his own music streaming offer Apple Music.
"If we think they have a dominant position, the case would be similar to our case against Google," Vestager said. For Google, the Commission found a dominant position, because the group in Europe has a share of about 90 percent in the Internet search - and its smartphone operating system Android runs in about 80 percent of the phones sold.
In the case of Apple, the situation is different: the iPhones, for example, only account for about 15 percent of smartphone sales. However, Apple only lets apps download from its in-house platform to the devices - and thus controls, according to some experts, the market for iPhone apps.
"We have a platform that leads customers to different providers, and then the platform starts to do such business themselves, becoming a vendor ourselves," said Vestager. That is a pattern "that we already know". "And it concerns a core issue of competition law, namely: how to deal with Internet platforms?"
In 2017, the European Commission imposed a fine of 2.42 billion euros on Google because, from the point of view of its competitors, Google had discriminated against price search engines - to the benefit of its own shopping search.