Apple appeals the European Union's decision to pay a $2 billion fine to Spotify

Apple said last March that it would appeal the fine it received in an antitrust case. The fine amounted to $2 billion in favor of Spotify, according to the European Union decision. But Apple decided to appeal the European Union's decision, and appealed the court's decision as a clear response that it had not done anything that warranted everything that was happening. Here are all the details in the following paragraphs, God willing.

What did Apple do to pay the $2 billion fine?

The case between Spotify began in 2019. Spotify claimed that the App Store rules gave some privileges to Apple's Apple Music app. These opportunities and features are not granted to other applications on the App Store.

The reason Spotify challenged what Apple was doing was that Spotify pays 30% for each in-app subscription to Apple. All this during the first year, but in any subsequent year; The value will decrease to 15% for each subscription. Here Spotify asked a clear question to everyone: Does Apple lose 30% of every subscription to the Apple Music app?! The answer is of course no. This is what stopped Spotify, and made it accuse Apple of practicing monopolistic behavior and reducing the chances of competition in the market.

In addition, Apple's restrictive rules on competition have made Spotify avoid telling its users how to sign up. This is because Spotify was prohibited from directing users to the subscription page of their official website.

Here came the role of the European Union. And that's where The European Union decided to impose a fine on Apple estimated at approximately 1.8 billion euros Or $2 billion. And all of this is in exchange for its monopolistic behavior against Spotify over the past years. Reports from Bloomberg indicate that Apple has decided to appeal the European Union's decision. She also announced that she would appeal against the court's decision, and submitted a formal request to cancel the decision issued last March.

Why did Apple decide to appeal the European Union's decision?

The fact of the matter is that Apple does not dispute that its policy caused some harm to Spotify's sales. But what Apple challenges is that antitrust laws' primary goal is to protect the consumer himself. Apple will indicate that its policy does not affect consumer interests in any way.

But on the other hand, it is difficult for Apple to prove this point. In addition, the essence of antitrust laws within the European Union is that their primary goal is to ensure free and fair competition between all companies that serve consumers. Based on this point, Apple is guilty before the European Union, because it used its dominance to limit competition and consequently harmed the interest of the European consumer.

Here we have to cite Apple's position with the European Court on the issue of dominance in the application distribution market. At that time, the court decided to force Apple to allow developers to sell content within applications, such as music books or subscriptions, through channels other than the App Store. All of this is because Apple was requiring developers to pay 30% on all in-app purchases.

What did Apple do then? Quite simply, Apple decided to flout the court's decision by allowing developers to sell content outside the App Store, and charging them a 27% commission on those sales.

Finally, we have to say that this is not the first time that Apple has been accused of monopolistic practices or limiting competition by the European Union. But does this clearly affect the European consumer and require paying a fine of 12 billion dollars? We will see what happens in the coming days and what is the European Union's response to Apple's appeal.