“Spotify and a host of European internet businesses have called on Brussels to crack down on what they see as troubling practices by the likes of Apple and Google,” Duncan Robinson and Madhumita Murgia report for The Financial Times. “Big internet platforms ‘can and do abuse their privileged position,’ according to a letter signed by the chief executives of Spotify, music streaming rival Deezer and German start-up investor Rocket Internet among others.”
“Although the letter to the European Commission does not cite the Silicon Valley giants by name, it complains that some mobile operating systems, app stores and search engines have evolved from ‘gateways’ into ‘gatekeepers’ — effectively hindering rivals from competing with their own services,” Robinson and Murgia report. “The letter comes in the midst of a debate inside the commission around overhauling digital policy, with new proposals due later this year aimed at addressing allegedly unfair contractual clauses enforced by big platforms.”
“Common complaints from the companies include not being able to access customer data when they sign up through an app store, as well as big companies promoting their own services over [those of] third parties,” Robinson and Murgia report. “The letter comes after a row between Spotify and Apple last year, when the streaming company accused the iPhone maker of blocking updates to its iOS app, citing ‘business model rules.’ It claimed this was done maliciously in order to promote its own music product, Apple Music.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Perhaps the EU should look inward and ask itself why it can’t create its own big platforms like Apple and its semifast-followers Google (mobile; iOS knockoff) and, for that matter, Microsoft (desktop; Mac knockoff)?
It is just bad luck or is it a stifling centralized bureaucracy that’s resulted in EU companies being unable to go big and achieve their own “privileged positions,” instead being parasitic whining babies reduced to crying to mommy?