Tag: App Store
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APP STORE CLAIMS: ANOTHER IMPORTANT LINK TO THE CJEU’S CHAIN IN PRIVATE ENFORCEMENT CASES
As private antitrust litigation against tech companies becomes increasingly common, courts are increasingly called upon to determine international and territorial jurisdiction for antitrust infringements that are committed in the EU without any physical location. The EU jurisdictional rule in Article 7(2) of the Brussels I-bis Regulation (Brussels I-bis) for tort cases uses the place where…
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Platform divergence and geographic divergence after Microsoft/Activision and Apple v CMA
In January 2022, we first reported on the CMA’s concerns that Apple had been blocking cloud gaming apps on the App Store (Google does allow those apps on Play Store but does not allow in-app purchases to be completed within cloud gaming apps). The CMA referred this issue to a full market investigation on 22…
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Into Uncharted Waters – Making sense of the CAT’s Apple/CMA judgment
In November last year, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) started a market investigation into the supply of web browsers and browser engines on mobile devices, and the distribution of cloud gaming services through app stores on mobile devices. However, Apple appealed the CMA’s decision to make a market investigation reference (MIR) in the…
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Interview with Tom Fish, Head of public policy and research at Gener8, and formerly Assistant Director at the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority
Tom Smith, Geradin Partners: November 2022 was an important month for the UK’s efforts to curb the power of big tech. The Chancellor announced in his Autumn Statement that the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill will be introduced into parliament in the 3rd parliamentary session (it is currently rumoured to be scheduled for April…
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The DMA is coming. Here’s what it will mean for mobile gaming
The App Store and Play Store are huge profit generators for Apple and Google. As explained by Judge Gonzalez Rogers in her Epic v Apple judgment of September 2021, gaming apps account for approximately 70% of all App Store revenues. According to some, this means that Apple makes more money from games than Microsoft, Sony,…
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Antitrust is turning its eye to gaming
Last week, I spoke at the Video Games Bar Association’s annual summit which took place at devcom in Cologne, Germany. The event confirmed to me that gaming is where the innovative technologies of the future are in many ways already a reality today. It was my contention at the conference that competition law is turning…
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The CMA Final Report on the Mobile Ecosystems market study: a repudiation of Apple’s narrative over privacy and safety as justifications for the status quo
On 10 June 2022, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published its Final Report on its year-long market study into mobile ecosystems – namely mobile operating systems, app stores, and web browsers. The CMA found that Apple and Google have a tight grip over these increasingly crucial ecosystems, which in turn places them in…
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Apple’s constructive refusal to comply with the law: A harbinger of things to come?
In August 2021, the Autoriteit Consument & Markt (“ACM”), the Dutch competition authority, adopted following a two-year investigation, a decision finding that Apple’s App Store payment policies as they applied to dating app providers amounted to an abuse of a dominant position in breach of Article 102 TFEU. As explained in an earlier blog post,…
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Apple’s cloud gaming restrictions may be biggest news in CMA interim report
As we explained in December, the CMA’s interim report on mobile ecosystems was a great piece of work which takes a holistic view of mobile ecosystems and the competition problems associated with these ecosystems. One concern raised in the interim report was not previously seen in the multiple reports and decisions issued by competition authorities…
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The Interim Report of the CMA’s Market Study on Mobile Ecosystems : A Great Piece of Work
On 14 December 2021, the CMA published the Interim Report of its Market Study on Mobile Ecosystems. This is a massive (445 pages + annexes) piece of work, which is – as always with the CMA – extremely well done. The purpose of this Interim Report is for the CMA to share the content of…