EU Hearing 'Many Concerns' About Potential Anticompetitive Issues With Apple Pay

Thursday November 7, 2019 6:26 am PST by Eric Slivka

European Union Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager today acknowledged that her department has received "many concerns" over Apple Pay and potential anticompetitive issues, noting that "people see it becomes increasingly difficult to compete in the market for easy payments," reports Reuters.

apple pay terminal
Vestager's comments come after the European Commission sent a questionnaire to a number of companies in August seeking information on whether Apple was restricting online payment options.

The questionnaire asked if companies were under a contractual obligation to enable a certain payment method and also if such contracts included conditions for integrating Apple Pay in their apps and websites.

Regulators wanted to know if Apple has rejected merchant apps as incompatible with the terms and conditions for integrating Apple Pay in their apps.

Apple touts the safety and security of ‌Apple Pay‌, but critics have claimed that Apple stifles competition by locking down the NFC chip in iOS devices to only work with ‌Apple Pay‌, making it difficult for other payment services to compete.

Antitrust concerns over ‌Apple Pay‌ are not the only issue for Apple and the EU at the moment, as the European Commission is also still dealing with Spotify's complaint that Apple's App Store unfairly disadvantages third-party app developers in favor of its own apps and services.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

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Top Rated Comments

Glideslope

51 months ago

**** the EU. :apple:

Score: 27 Votes (Like | Disagree)

cube

**** monopolies.

Score: 24 Votes (Like | Disagree)

MacLawyer

What? Apple has a 15-16% market share in the EU. This is becoming ridiculous. Let's face it, this is a money grab.

Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)

DoctorTech

We are already in the PRSI forum so here is my analogy. I view choosing a mobile phone platform (iOS vs Android vs "other") like voting for a US Presidential candidate. You have candidate "A" with a set of positions on various issues and candidate "B" with a different set of positions on those same issues. It is pretty much a package deal, do you want position set "A" or position set "B"? You can't take one candidates position on taxes and a different candidate's position on healthcare and a 3rd party candidate's position on something else to create your own candidate to vote for - you either vote for "A" or "B" (or throw your vote away voting on a 3rd party candidate who will end up with 0.7% of the vote).

As voters, you vote the candidate who agrees with you on what is most important to you even if they don't agree with you on everything. I vote for Apple over Android because I agree with the VAST majority of what Apple does. If being able to use Google Pay or Walmart Pay is your top issue, then vote Android.

Score: 20 Votes (Like | Disagree)

FloatingBones

No excuse for Apple saying they are the only ones allowed to access the hardware feature.

It's anti-consumer. Though at least in this case you can understand Apple doing it out of greed. Them locking their customers out of using the bluetooth chip in HomePods to stream music is just pure spite.

Apple opened up NDEF Tag writing and native tag access with iOS 13. Here's the WWDC session where this was all discussed. ('https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/715/') Doesn't the EU pay attention to these developments? Do you?

Score: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Mtmspa