Apple and Alphabet subsidiary Google are facing a probe over anti-competitive practices in Mexico after the country’s former telecommunications chief filed a complaint, he said in a statement on Twitter on Friday.
The complaint was brought to Mexico’s telecommunications regulator IFT yesterday by Mony de Swaan Addati, who once headed the former telecommunications federation that was later replaced by IFT.
His complaint accuses Apple and Google of “completely inhibit(ing) competition” by “taking advantage of their monopoly in app stores to tie use of their own payment processing systems for in-app purchases.”
In his online statement, de Swaan Addati said Google’s Play store and Apple’s store charge 15%-20% commission, forcing price inflation.
MacDailyNews Take: These bureaucrats, and the handful of developers who whine to them, have lot the plot.
Apple’s App Store isn’t a charity and it’s not free to operate.
How much did it cost developers to have their apps burned onto CDs, boxed, shipped, displayed on store shelves prior to Apple remaking the world for the better for umpteenth time? Apple incurs costs to store, review, organize, surface, and distribute apps to over one billion users. — MacDailyNews, September 9, 2020
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MDM take – right on the money. Why can’t these countries see that?
I think the case against Google may be weaker since Android Apps purchased elsewhere (e.g. Amazon App Store) does not go through Google’s payment service. The same is probably true for other Android 3rd party App stores having their own payment system or since any developer can distribute Apps themselves, they don’t need to depend on a 3rd party payment system tied to a specific vendor. In that light, Apple’s sole control of iOS app distribution through their App store would be the sticking point.