Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are training their eyes on Apple Inc, unnerving investors with fears over fines and threatening its market dominance.
US Department of Justice and 16 attorneys general are suing the iPhone maker for violating antitrust laws, while in Europe, the company is said to be facing probes about whether it is complying with EU’s Digital Markets Act.
Shares of the company slid 4.1 percent on Thursday, erasing about US$113 billion in market value and taking their year-to-date loss back to 11 percent. Once the world’s most valuable firm at more than US$3 trillion, Apple has underperformed both the NASDAQ 100 and the S&P 500 this year.
Photo: Bloomberg
It is not the first time Apple is coming under regulatory scrutiny. The company and its peers have for years faced accusations of enriching themselves by suppressing competitors.
However, as Apple’s products have grown ever-more popular and established themselves as part of daily life worldwide, authorities have also become more combative and wary of its power.
The US suit, filed on Thursday in New Jersey federal court, accuses Apple of blocking rivals from accessing hardware and software features on its popular devices.
The potential investigations in Europe, which are also targeting some of Apple’s rivals, would focus on the firm’s new fees, terms and conditions for app store developers.
“There comes a point in which the downpour of cases and scrutiny that comes with them become a real drag on how these companies operate,” said Bill Kovacic, an antitrust professor at George Washington University Law School. “Even if they win, in an important way they’ve lost.”
Apple fired back at the US lawsuit by calling it “wrong on the facts and the law.”
It said that the action would “set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology” and vowed to “vigorously defend against it.”
The company did not respond to a request for comment on the potential European probes.
The US lawsuit alleges that Apple has used its power over app distribution on the iPhone to thwart innovations that would have made it easier for consumers to switch phones.
The company has refused to support cross-platform messaging apps, limited third-party digital wallets and non-Apple smartwatches, and blocked mobile cloud streaming services, according to the US department.
The department highlights five examples of technologies in which it says Apple suppresses competition: super apps, cloud streaming game apps, messaging apps, smartwatches and digital wallets.
The company recently added support for cloud-based gaming services and said it would add Rich Communication Services cross-platform messaging later this year.
“At Apple, we innovate every day to make technology people love — designing products that work seamlessly together, protect people’s privacy and security, and create a magical experience for our users,” the company said in a statement. “This lawsuit threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets.”
The Digital Markets Act — which lays out a series of do’s and don’ts for some of the world’s largest tech platforms — allows the European Commission to levy hefty penalties of as much as 10 percent of a company’s annual worldwide revenue, and up to 20 percent for firms who repeatedly flout the rules.
In a small town in Paraguay, a showdown is brewing between traditional producers of yerba mate, a bitter herbal tea popular across South America, and miners of a shinier treasure: gold. A rush for the precious metal is pitting mate growers and indigenous groups against the expanding operations of small-scale miners who, until recently, were their neighbors, not nemeses. “They [the miners] have destroyed everything... The canals, springs, swamps,” said Vidal Britez, president of the Yerba Mate Producers’ Association of the town of Paso Yobai, about 210km east of capital Asuncion. “You can see the pollution from the dead fish.
MULTIFACETED: A task force has analyzed possible scenarios and created responses to assist domestic industries in dealing with US tariffs, the economics minister said The Executive Yuan is tomorrow to announce countermeasures to US President Donald Trump’s planned reciprocal tariffs, although the details of the plan would not be made public until Monday next week, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. The Cabinet established an economic and trade task force in November last year to deal with US trade and tariff related issues, Kuo told reporters outside the legislature in Taipei. The task force has been analyzing and evaluating all kinds of scenarios to identify suitable responses and determine how best to assist domestic industries in managing the effects of Trump’s tariffs, he
A wave of stop-loss selling and panic selling hit Taiwan's stock market at its opening today, with the weighted index plunging 2,086 points — a drop of more than 9.7 percent — marking the largest intraday point and percentage loss on record. The index bottomed out at 19,212.02, while futures were locked limit-down, with more than 1,000 stocks hitting their daily drop limit. Three heavyweight stocks — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (Foxconn, 鴻海精密) and MediaTek (聯發科) — hit their limit-down prices as soon as the market opened, falling to NT$848 (US$25.54), NT$138.5 and NT$1,295 respectively. TSMC's
ASML Holding NV, the sole producer of the most advanced machines used in semiconductor manufacturing, said geopolitical tensions are harming innovation a day after US President Donald Trump levied massive tariffs that promise to disrupt trade flows across the entire world. “Our industry has been built basically on the ability of people to work together, to innovate together,” ASML chief executive officer Christophe Fouquet said in a recorded message at a Thursday industry event in the Netherlands. Export controls and increasing geopolitical tensions challenge that collaboration, he said, without specifically addressing the new US tariffs. Tech executives in the EU, which is
RSS