The founder of music streaming app Spotify has used a rare visit to Brussels to apply personal pressure on the European Commission for a case against Apple’s competition practices to be sped up.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Swedish billionaire Daniel Ek said he spoke with commissioner Margrethe Vestager about what he sees as Apple’s “anti-competitive conduct”.
“It’s a picture of a company that keeps zigging and zagging to avoid doing anything”, he said of the iPhone maker. Regulators in Japan, the Netherlands and South Korea that “have come down pretty hard on” Apple, Ek said, and he urged the commission to do the same.
Spotify filed a complaint before European regulators in 2019 claiming that Apple was taking a 30 per cent cut of its subscription fees for featuring it in the App Store and denying the streaming service the right to tell its users that other ways of upgrading were available. The European Commission only formally charged Apple with breaking EU law earlier this year.
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