The European Commission works very hard at making Europe really unattractive to non-EU businesses. Apple is no angel, but the obvious bias in favour of Spotify is kind of ridiculous, but luckily they don't have a leg to stand on if this case goes to court, so my prediction will be that Apple will eventually prevail in this particular case.
US just fined Visa and MasterCard $30 bn for charging shops too much and causing price increases. A judge found $30 bn wasn't enough. The case of App Store is similar and could very well go to courts in the US. US, EU, and most of the world have antitrust regulation in place. EU under Vestager was known for being all open markets to the point where unions gave her a statue of a raised middle finger (a statue she kept on display at her office). The next 5 years are likely to be protectionism just as we have seen from US. But this case... it could happen in US and would give us more competition and better pricing.
That was not a fine, that was a settlement in a lawsuit that's been going on for over 10 years now. If Visa and MasterCard didn't offer this $30B to settle the case, the lawsuit could very well go on for another 10 years. The US government haven't found Visa and MasterCard guilty of anything yet.
Until Apple released the iPhone I doubt Spotify even had personal streaming as a viable proposition (if they even existed then). Given Apple have charged right from the start, Spotify could just have said “We don’t want to use your expensive delivery system” and done it themselves. But they didn’t. And now they complain (or at least some people are).
They did exist. Spotify was founded in 2006, 2 years before the iOS App Store was launched.
The Spotify service was launched as a Windows application, later came a Mac version and a Web version and the rest. The users of Spotify requested a native iOS app iso the web basedapp, which Spotify built.
But the main issue for Spotify that Apple did not allow that the native iOS app could link to the existing Spotify payment processor, used for all the other versions. This was a serious cost increase for Spotify, not only because of the Apple 30% cut, but also because suddenly their administration backend and their support channel had to incorporate the Apple iOS adminstrative handling.
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