> Apple's guidelines pertaining to banning developers from linking to or communicating alternative payment methods were illegal.
If those guidelines were always clearly illegal, why has it taken decades to take Apple to court?
I don't think they should be legal, but there are of a lot of other questionable licensing conditions that seem to be legal too so why all the focus on Apple? You have to be very naive to believe it's all about the law and there's nothing like some political power grab going on.
It’s taken six years since the EU investigated, leading to the DMA which took time to write then had a lengthy lead-in before it came into effect and the 1.8 billion anti-steering fine was incurred. Compliance is still “pending”, with contrived fees and scare walls and hardware restrictions against the EU’s wishes.
And in that time there was the 2020 congressional investigation in the US and failed attempt at similar laws. Later this year the DOJ antitrust stemming from this investigation will finally commence.
In 2021 the steering terms were ruled illegal in the US and it took three years to bounce back from the Supreme Court then another year for Apple’s noncompliance contempt to be measured.
Part of their noncompliance has been dragging things out to the extent the judge recently made sure their ruling applied immediately, and delivered it before Apple even finished debating which amongst 10,000s of pages of evidence documents to provide or suppress.
In that time the EU and DOJ have gone after Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft extensively too.
If those guidelines were always clearly illegal, why has it taken decades to take Apple to court? I don't think they should be legal, but there are of a lot of other questionable licensing conditions that seem to be legal too so why all the focus on Apple? You have to be very naive to believe it's all about the law and there's nothing like some political power grab going on.