In a major blow to Apple, the highest court in Europe has rejected Apple’s legal challenge to the EU’s ruling to categorize the App Store and iOS platform as “gatekeepers” under the terms of the Digital Markets Act. The ruling ensures that Apple will have to comply with strict obligations in order to ensure fair competition and not favor its services above the services offered by its competitors.
The Core of the Dispute
Apple’s legal challenge was filed in 2024 against the European Commission’s grouping of five different App Stores – for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch – into a single core platform service. Apple also contested the decision to designate iOS as a gateway platform that requires it to allow interoperability between the operating system and rival services.
DMA Requirements and Prohibitions
According to the Digital Markets Act, being categorized as a “gatekeeper” obliges a company to comply with a number of strict obligations to ensure an open digital market:
- Anti-Favoritism: The gatekeeper must not put its own services before those offered by its third-party competitors.
- Data Use Regulations: The companies cannot combine personal data about users between different services without explicit permission from the users.
- Alternative Stores: The gatekeeper must give an option to use an alternative app store to its users.
- Interoperability: In terms of the Digital Markets Act, iOS has to be interoperable with rival services, thus removing barriers to accessing it.
iMessage and Other Matters
In addition to challenging the App Store and iOS issues, Apple also tried to challenge the designation of iMessage as a “number-independent interpersonal communications service” (NIICS) that makes the messaging service subject to certain requirements from the telecom industry. According to the ruling from the General Court in Luxembourg, Apple’s challenges of the iMessage matter were inadmissible.
Requirements for “Gatekeepers”
The Digital Markets Act stipulates several strict criteria to label a company as a gatekeeper:
- Financial Criteria: Either annual revenues of at least €7.5 billion, or a market capitalization of €75 billion and more across the whole of the EU.
- Users Criteria: At least 45 million active monthly end-users in the EU.
- Business Criteria: More than 10,000 active businesses per year using the services in the EU.
This ruling is a major moment in the developing story of the Big Tech’s interaction with EU regulators and shows that the Digital Markets Act is being enforced actively.
