Apple has spent two years arguing that Europe’s digital rulebook should not apply to it in quite the way Brussels insists. On Wednesday, the EU’s General Court told it, in effect, that it does.
The court threw out Apple’s challenge to being labelled a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act, the designation that ties the App Store and iOS to a long list of obligations built to give rivals a way in. It was a clean loss on the points the court was willing to hear.
Apple’s core argument was really about how you count a company. It said the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV ought to be treated as separate services rather than lumped together, a distinction that would have shrunk what the rules could reach.
The judges were not persuaded. They found that Apple’s app stores all do the same job of connecting developers with users, a conclusion that goes to the heart of the long fight over third-party app stores.
One strand of the case never got a proper hearing. The court decided that Apple’s complaints about iMessage were inadmissible, so that piece falls away rather than being resolved either way.
