From the Editor’s Desk: Thinking Clearly About the Rotten Apple (Premium)

Today, the European Commission (EC) charged Apple with violating the legal requirements of the EU Digital Marketing Act (DMA). This should come as no surprise: Apple is clearly doing so, and deliberately. And yet, these types of stories always dredge up the same tired complaints from certain circles.

We can do better than this.

I honestly don't care where anyone falls on the DMA or any other antitrust laws. It is what it is. What I do care about is facts, logic, and reason. Common sense and reasonableness. But I really care about not having to deal with the same baseless, irrational, and emotional noise that always erupts when there's a story like this. There are less well-informed readers on other sites who might find conspiracy theories, political agendas, and other distractions interesting. But that's not the case here, and with too much of this non-debate descending into misinformation, I'm going to make it simple for everyone.

This is not complicated.

The DMA exists, and it's explicit. As a gatekeeper, Apple is required by law to allow app developers to communicate to their own customers that there are "cheaper purchasing possibilities" that exist outside of Apple's App Store and in-app payment systems. Apple must let them do this "free of charge," and it must let developers "steer" their customers "to those offers and allow them to make purchases."

The EC complaint explains that Apple does not do any of that. Instead, Apple created three sets of business terms governing its relationship with app developers, each of which violate the DMA.

The first prevents app developers from providing alternative pricing information to their customers within their apps or communicate "in any way" with their customers about promotions offered elsewhere.

The second requires app developers to only use "link-outs," which links in their apps, that redirect customers to a web page where they can conclude a contract. This link-out process "is subject to several restrictions imposed by Apple that prevent app developers from communicating, promoting offers, and concluding contracts through the distribution channel of their choice."

The third is that Apple's fees for using this link-out process are too high. Apple can charge fees, but as everyone knows, the fee structure it created because of the DMA was specifically designed to prevent app developers from using it, to keep them under Apple's fee structure umbrella. "The fees charged by Apple go beyond what is strictly necessary for such remuneration," the EC explains. "For example, Apple charges developers a fee for every purchase of digital goods or services a user makes within seven days after a link-out from the app."

The EC announced it is separately investigating Apple's App Store fee structure, which is roughly 5 to 10 times as high as the fees charged by Mastercard and other credit card companies. That's a separate issue. But the complaint we're discussing here is about fees...