EU antitrust chief Vestager meets with Apple CEO Cook, other tech CEOs
Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age (no joke, that’s her real title)
In posts on social media platform X on Friday, the EU’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said she met with Apple CEO Tim Cook and the CEOs of Alphabet and Qualcomm to discuss regulation and competition policy compliance.
2 main points from my meeting w/ @tim_cook @apple
compliance w/ #DMA, e.g. @Apple’s obligation to allow the distribution of #apps outside the @AppStore
ongoing @EU_Competition cases e.g. @AppleMusic pic.twitter.com/G2gP51IW8L
— Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) January 12, 2024
Reuters:
Last week, Vestager’s communications adviser said she would speak to chief executives of Apple, Alphabet, Broadcom, and Nvidia in the United States, focusing on European digital regulation including the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and competition policy.
With Apple’s Tim Cook, she said she discussed, among other things, the company’s obligation to allow the distribution of its apps outside its proprietary AppStore, as well as ongoing competition cases like the one involving its music streaming service Apple Music.
Under DMA, companies with more than 45 million monthly active users and a 75-billion-euros ($82 billion) market capitalisation are considered gatekeepers, and labelled as such, they are required for example to make their messaging apps interoperate with rivals and let users decide which apps to pre-install on their devices.
MacDailyNews Take: As per iMessage, aswe wrote in September:
With the UK — where Apple’s iMessage is actually used in numbers — no longer a part of the quasi-governmental EU bureaucracy and the majority of the people in EU countries using WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, etc., it’s entirely possible, if not probable, that Apple falls outside of the EU red tape machine’s latest bout of innovation-stifling overreach.
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