French Court Slashes Apple Antitrust Fine in Blow to European Regulators

'Apple won a massive reduction in a 1.1 billion euro ($1.1 billion) antitrust fine from French competition regulators,' reports CNBC, 'in a blow to the ambitions of European authorities to crack down on the dominance of Big Tech companies.'

The Paris appeals court on Thursday lowered the fine to 371.6 million euros, roughly a third of the value of the original penalty and a reduction of 728.4 million euros, an Apple spokesperson confirmed.According to Reuters, the amount was slashed because the court decided to drop one of the charges related to price fixing, and lower the rate originally used to calculate the fine....

In 2020, the French competition watchdog fined Apple 1.1 billion euros for allegedly pressuring premium resellers into fixing prices of non-iPhone products, such as its Mac and iPad computers, and abusing the economic dependence of its outside resellers. Tech Data and Ingram Micro, two global electronics wholesalers, were also fined 76.1 million euros and 62.9 million euros, respectively. The regulator accused Apple, Tech Data and Ingram Micro of agreeing not to compete and preventing independent resellers from competing with each other, 'thereby sterilizing the wholesale market for Apple products.'

Apple response, according to Reuters: 'While the court correctly reversed part of the French Competition Authority's decision, we believe it should be overturned in full and plan to appeal.
'The decision relates to practices from more than a decade ago that even the (French authority) recognised are no longer in use.'

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