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Italian Watchdog Confirms Third Antitrust Inquiry into Apple

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Italy's antitrust regulator has today opened another inquiry into Apple for allegedly improper commercial practices with regards to cloud computing services (via Reuters).

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The investigation will also look into the practices of Google and Dropbox, in addition to Apple. The L'Autorit Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM) did not release further information or state how long the investigation would take, and Apple has yet to comment on the matter.

"The proceedings relate to alleged improper commercial practices and the possible inclusion of unfair clauses in contract conditions," the AGCM said in a statement.

The investigation is the third by the AGCM into Apple. In July, the AGCM began scrutinizing Apple and Amazon over allegations that the two companies blocked the sale of Apple and Beats devices to resellers in order to stifle competition. Each investigation is separate and managed irrespective of other ongoing investigations.

A previous AGCM probe looked into the company for iPhone battery slowdowns, which the antitrust watchdog said was a form of planned obsolescence. It subsequently demanded a 10 million euro fine from Apple as a sanction.

Tags: Apple Antitrust, iCloud, Italy
Related Forum: Apple Music, Apple Pay/Card, iCloud, Fitness+

Top Rated Comments

ThunderSkunk Avatar
ThunderSkunk
73 months ago
Well, the Italian government has to maintain its high standards for ethical behavior and culture of fairness in business...

lololololol
Score: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jayducharme Avatar
jayducharme
73 months ago
It reminds me of sharks. Once there's blood in the water, the entire shiver crowds in for their share.
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
gfbio Avatar
gfbio
73 months ago

Well, the Italian government has to maintain its high standards for ethical behavior and culture of fairness in business...

lololololol
Well, your comment is deeply unjustified as a lot of things changed in the last years.
You'd better focus on Mr. President :)
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
B
bsolar
73 months ago

Failed states with no high-tech industries are looking for money. When will Italy go bankrupt? This year or next?
Italy's GDP has trended more or less in-line with the EU, about -12% this quarter. USA's GDP is at -31% in the same period...
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
H
H2SO4
73 months ago

Well, the Italian government has to maintain its high standards for ethical behavior and culture of fairness in business...

lololololol
Whilst your flippant remark actually is very funny, there's more to it than that.
Apple maintains a facade of high standards for ethical behaviour and culture of fairness in business, but they are still the ones that people have to take to court to get their battery replaced, their peeling screen replaced, their faulty graphics card replaced, and lots more.
Some of these 'lots more' are things that they knew of and went ahead and sold the products anyway. To paraphrase for you -
Me: Hi Apple, my GPU has failed again due to a manufacturing defect.
Apple: F*** Off. We'll see you in court.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
P
Picard J.L.
73 months ago

The official announcement from AGCM is here ('https://www.agcm.it/media/comunicati-stampa/2020/9/CV194-CV195-CV196-PS11147-PS11149-PS11150') (in Italian). There are a few details:

* The investigation for unfair practices is about lack of proper notification to the user of personal data collection for commercial purposes. Furthermore, apparently they take issue that cloud storage services are being linked to such data collection without giving the user the ability to deny consent.
* The investigation for unfair contractual clauses is about the ability the services operators grant themselves to suspend service, deny liabilities in case of user data loss, the ability to unilaterally modify contract clauses and lack of a full Italian versions of the contract text.

Honestly I also don't understand why if i'm paying for their service they still say they are not liable if data loss occurs. They absolutely are, I give my data to them for storage and pay them for doing that.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
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