CMA opens investigations into Apple and Google over mobile practices – SiliconANGLE News

The U.K.’s antitrust regulator today opened investigations into Apple Inc. and Google LLC over their business practices in the mobile market.

The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, is picking up where it left off last August. That month, the regulator closed a pair of probes into Apple and Google it had launched in 2021 and 2022, respectively. The CMA explained at the time that it was planning to restart the reviews under the U.K.’s DMCC Act, an antitrust law which went into effect earlier this year.

The DMCC gives the watchdog new tools for regulating tech giants that have so-called strategic market status. A company receives this status if its worldwide annual revenue exceeds £25 billion or its U.K. revenue exceeds £1 billion and it also has a “substantial and entrenched market power in a digital activity.”

The DMCC probes that the CMA announced today have two main goals. The first is to determine if Apple and Google have strategic market status in the mobile market. According to the CMA, the second goal is to identify whether the companies engage in business practices that harm the competition.

Antitrust officials will look into whether Apple and Google are giving their apps an unfair edge on their respective mobile operating systems. In parallel, the regulator will search for competitive barriers that “may be preventing other competitors from offering rival products.” A third focus of the probes will be determining whether Google and Apple are making it difficult for users to “make active choices about which apps they are using.”

If the CMA finds that the companies breached competition rules, it could order them to change their business practices. The watchdog today listed several potential changes it might order in such a scenario. The CMA could, for example, require that Apple and Google make it easier for users to make in-app purchases outside their respective app stores.

In-app purchases were a major focus of the original antitrust probes into Google and Apple that the CMAA closed last August. When those investigations launched, the companies required in-app transactions to be processed using their app stores’ payment systems. CMA officials were concerned that this requirement could hurt mobile developers.

Since then, Google and Apple have both made extensive changes to their terms of service. Last year, the companies made it easier for developers in the Europe Union to process in-app purchases using external payment systems. They earlier lowered some payment processing fees.

The CMA could order the companies to change their business areas in other areas as well. According to the regulator, officials may decide that Apple and Google should make certain features of their operating systems more easily accessible to third-party app developers. 

“We will continue to engage constructively with the CMA as their work on this matter progresses,” Apple said in a statement. “We face competition in every segment and jurisdiction where we operate, and our focus is always the trust of our users.”

“We will work constructively with the CMA on these topics and pursue outcomes that avoid stifling choice and opportunity for consumers and businesses, and avoid exposing users to new security and privacy risks,” Oliver Bethell, Google’s senior director of competition, wrote in a blog post today. 

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