Under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Apple is required to permit developers to freely inform customers of different offers outside its App Store.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg via Getty Images
The European Union on Wednesday fined Apple and Meta a whole bunch of tens of millions of euros each for breaching the bloc’s digital competition laws.
The European Commission, which is the chief body of the EU, said it was fining Apple 500 million euros ($571 million) and Meta 200 million euros ($228.4 million) for breaches of the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Officials said that Apple didn’t comply with so-called “anti-steering” obligations under the DMA. Under the EU’s tech law, Apple is required to permit developers to freely inform customers of different offers outside its App Store.
The tech giant was ordered by the EU to remove technical and business restrictions on steering and to refrain from perpetuating its non-compliant conduct in the longer term.
Apple said in a press release that it planned to appeal the EU tremendous while continuing its discussions with the Commission.
“Today’s announcements are yet one more example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple in a series of choices which are bad for the privacy and security of our users, bad for products, and force us to provide away our technology totally free,” Apple said.
“We have now spent a whole bunch of 1000’s of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for. Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to maneuver the goal posts every step of the way in which,” the corporate added.
For Meta, the EU Commission found that the social media group illegally required users to consent to sharing their data with the corporate or pay for an ad-free service. This was in response to Meta’s introduction of a paid subscription tier for Facebook and Instagram in November 2023.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in a press release that the Commission was “attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European corporations to operate under different standards.”
“This is not only a couple of tremendous; the Commission forcing us to vary our business model effectively imposes a multi-billion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to supply an inferior service. And by unfairly restricting personalized promoting the European Commission can also be hurting European businesses and economies,” Kaplan said.
The EU said its tremendous for Meta took into consideration steps that the tech giant took to comply with its rules through a new edition of its free personalized ads service that uses less personal data to display commercial.
“The Commission is currently assessing this recent option and continues its dialogue with Meta, requesting the corporate to offer evidence of the impact that this recent ads model has in practice,” regulators said.
Meta was sent a cease-and-desist order by the EU ordering it to make changes to its less personalized ads option over the approaching 60 days or face further fines, in response to a source acquainted with the matter, who asked to stay anonymous as the data isn’t public.
The antitrust decision risks potential retaliation from U.S. President Donald Trump, who has made no secret of his displeasure with the EU’s regulatory enforcement actions on America’s digital giants.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration imposed so-called “reciprocal” tariffs of 20% on EU goods entering the U.S. He later dropped the brand new tariff rates on dozens of trading partners — including the EU — to 10% for a limited time period for trade negotiations.
The reciprocal tariffs got here after Trump earlier issued a directive threatening to impose tariffs on Europe to combat what he called “overseas extortion” of American tech corporations through digital services taxes, fines, practices and policies.
