Apple’s iPadOS has been designated as a gatekeeper under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act rules by EU antitrust regulators because of its importance to business users, the European Commission said on Monday.
Reuters:
The European executive’s decision followed an investigation launched in September last year. Apple’s operating system iOS, its browser Safari and its App Store were designated gatekeepers last year.
“Our market investigation showed that despite not meeting the thresholds, iPadOS constitutes an important gateway on which many companies rely to reach their customers,” EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.
The Commission said Apple’s business user numbers exceeded the quantitative threshold by eleven times, while its end user numbers were close to the threshold and were predicted to rise in the near future. It said both business users and end users are locked into iPadOS because of its large ecosystem.
Apple, which has six months to comply with the DMA, said it would “continue to constructively engage with the European Commission to comply with the DMA across all designated services.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Despite not meeting the EC’s own thresholds, the EC will do whatever the hell it wants to iPadOS anyway. Nobody is “locked into iPadOS.” Apple currently has 47.16% – less than half – of the European tablet market.
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I suppose next they will sue Tesla because they can’t fit Jaguar Parts on it. Genuine Tesla parts are acting as a gatekeeper.
here on Musk Daily News, why aren’t you bitching about Elin’s ass kissing trip to commy red chyyyyyna!?!?!?
Europe is and always has been the best trading partner the USA ever had, ever since the French provided the resources and Naval powers for the patriots to win independence. The USA cannot make it on its own. 55 years of stalemate (to put it kindly) wars and corporate outsourcing have proven that. The average American cannot grow his own food and is dependent on disposable asian plastic junk to make himself feel as free as the nonstop consumerist advertising propaganda tells you to be. No wonder the average US citizen has tens of thousands of dollars in consumer debt and a further $100k per citizen national debt. That’s what happens when you spend beyond your means and spend all your time squabbling like idiots about political nonsense. this site seems to enjoy making it worse: free advertising for à corporation that produces nothing in the USA and tons of red meat to widen the political divisions.
Seriously Apple, you need to tell the EU to piss off and proactively pull your products out of the market and disable iCloud for EU in protest until enough people complain and force them to use common sense.
Do the same when the US does the same thing!
It makes perfect sense actually.
Apple’s greed since Jobs died is hitting them hard now.
The ios devices are locked into one app store.
If apple had allowed multiple app stores such as on macos they wouldn’t have attracted this kind of scrutiny.
The same goes for their proprietary lightening port when the rest of the industry moved to usb c.
Hey Samfree… this is how you make a cogent point. See above post by Digsy.
The Apple Store thing I agree on. They should have just made software that didn’t come from the Apple Store clear, the way it is done on the Mac.
The lightening port however, if that is a problem for you, move on. I can’t remember the last time I plugged in my iPhone anyway.
The bottom line is that none of this is a monopoly. There is nothing I get from Apple that I cannot get from someone else, except maybe some bureaucratic headaches. I can dump Apple in a minute if I want to. It’s gotton so that I spend 45% of my time under LINUX anyway.