The two-day stay of Apple CEO Tim Cook in Madrid was not touristy. This is the beginning of a European tour by the leader of the apple company that will take him to Brussels today to meet with the European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, Thierry Breton. On the agenda is the regulatory issue, with which the community executive has put big technology companies in the spotlight.
The European Commission has already claimed some important pieces in this field. The latest has been Apple's change of the connector on the brand's mobile phones, which in the new models of the iPhone 15 range are USB-C, the same one that all Android phones have used for a few years. European regulation has achieved one result – a single connector – for all markets in the world.
Breton and Cook will talk today about the regulatory aspects that Europe still has to clarify with Apple. The recent Digital Markets Act (DMA) seeks to limit the excessive power of digital platforms. Apple is among the six designated for this control along with Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Microsoft and Meta.
Apple has two important pending aspects of this regulation. On the one hand, the intention of the European executive is to end the monopoly of the App Store application store for the iPhone and iPad. Brussels wants to give freedom to download apps from other platforms. Apple argues that this openness will end the proverbial security of its devices, since it thoroughly reviews all applications before making them available to the public and verifies that they do not pose risks to the privacy or security of users. Google does the same with its Android app store, but its operating system allows downloads from alternative stores.
Another aspect of the discussion between the EU and Apple affects this company's iMessage messaging app. The European executive wants all applications of this type to be interoperable and to be able to send and receive messages between them. Technically, that presents a complicated challenge. For example, WhatsApp is based on the phone number, while iMessage can do without it and work only with user accounts identified by an email. The preservation of privacy in this exchange is also problematic.
The European Commission has given Apple's iMessage and Microsoft's Bing a moratorium to investigate further before including them in its project to make them interoperable. Cook's tour of Europe will end next Friday in England, an important market for Apple that applies its own regulations outside of those of the European Union.
