Italy's AGCM opens an investigation into Apple over exempting its own apps from ATT, a day after the EU confirmed sending Apple Pay questionnaires to retailers
Context & Ripple Effects
Italy’s move fits a broader record of Italian scrutiny of Apple’s platform conduct, including a 2020 inquiry into cloud-service contract terms and an earlier probe into software-update practices. The focus here is whether a platform rule is being applied consistently to Apple and outside developers.
The parallel EU outreach to retailers on Apple Pay puts app-policy enforcement and payments-market oversight on adjacent tracks, increasing the regulatory attention on how Apple governs access to its ecosystem.
First-order effects
- Apple must respond to AGCM’s examination of whether its own apps receive different treatment under ATT; third-party developers and advertisers gain a formal avenue for their concerns to be assessed.
- Retailers receiving EU Apple Pay questionnaires become direct sources of evidence for the Commission’s payments-market review.
Second-order effects
- Apple may face pressure to document and defend any distinction between its apps and third-party apps, while developers and advertisers will watch whether ATT enforcement changes their ability to measure and monetize app activity.
- The two inquiries broaden scrutiny from app-level privacy controls to payment access, raising the compliance burden across separate parts of Apple’s ecosystem.
Third-order effects
- If regulators increasingly treat nominally neutral platform rules as potential self-preferencing, ecosystem operators will face more demands for rules that are demonstrably consistent across first- and third-party services.
- The pattern points toward competition oversight that examines linked platform layers—app distribution, privacy controls, and payments—rather than evaluating each product in isolation.
The trend: European competition authorities are expanding scrutiny of whether major platforms apply ecosystem rules evenly when those rules also govern the platforms’ own services.